Step By Step: Getting Your Bitcoin Cash out of a Bitcoin Paper Wallet

in #cryptocurrency7 years ago (edited)

I always recommend controlling your own private keys because if you don't own and control the private key, you don't own the cryptocurrency. Centralized exchanges create risk because you have to trust them to not only secure the cryptocurrency you give them but also to give it back when you ask for it.

My bitcoin was tucked safely away in my paper wallets during the Bitcoin Cash hard fork. That means I wasn't able to sell the BCC/BCH once trading opened because most exchanges weren't initially accepting deposits. I also had some trouble getting it out of my paper wallets.

Since my phone died, I couldn't access Blockchain.info since 2FA (two-factor authentication) needs to be disabled on my account. That may take a couple weeks, unfortunately.

All attempts to install and run Electron Cash failed miserably. I'll spare you the details, but I spent over 5 hours one night (and three glasses of wine) but kept running into issues. It would crash on start up and suggestions to fix it only partially worked and later created corruption issues validating the blockchain headers.

It turns out, I just needed to upgrade the OS on my Mac to the latest version, so that's what I did.

Once I had that working, I had both Electron Cash and Electrum running (be careful, the first tries to be helpful by importing wallets from the second).

How I Got My Bitcoin Cash from my Paper Wallets

This post will give you step by step instructions on how I got my Bitcoin Cash (it's a detailed explanation of what I outlined in this post last week Safely Claiming Bitcoin Fork Coins Like Bitcoin Cash).


Please though, don't do anything until you've watched Episode 003 of Understanding Blockchain Freedom: Safety and Security. If you don't manage things correctly, you could lose all your cryptocurrency to hackers and thieves. You are responsible for your security. The video is less than 4 minutes long.


First, use Electrum and create a new wallet.

(Please note, all of the addresses and keys used in these images are throw-aways for demonstration and not to be used by anyone. I covered them over just to make sure people don't even bother trying.)

From the file menu:

Give it a name with meaning. If you have multiple paper wallets, I recommend doing each one separately, just to keep things clean.



This is where you need to put in your private key. If you have your keys stored in a password manager, this is a simple copy and paste. Otherwise you have to type it manually or use the QR reader approach (which may not be supported on all builds).

If you have private keys from other addresses, this process will work for them as well. If you have a Blockchain.info wallet, as an example, you can view your addresses under settings and get the private key for each one here:

Encrypt your wallet with a strong password you generated from your password manager and saved their securely.

Verify the address and make sure the amount is what you expect:

If it's not, don't freak out! One of the private addresses I imported showed me a different public key than I expected and it had a zero balance! I turns out, there's a difference between a Private Key WIF and a Private Key WIF Compressed.

If the Private Key starts with a 5 and is 51 characters, it's in the WIF format. If it starts with a K or L and has 52 characters, it's in the WIF Compressed format. Googling around, I happened to find this Reddit comment which explains how you can use bitaddress.org to get the other private key if the one you have doesn't give you the address you're looking for.


Once I imported the correct key to Electrum, I got the public address (and balance) I expected.

So, as I explained in my previous post, you'll want to move all the bitcoin off of these addresses completely. Send them to a new paper wallet if you want or to something fancy like the Ledger Nano S I recently got.

Once that's done, the private keys you have now are completely free of bitcoin and ready to be imported again into Electron Cash. You basically repeat the whole process again using Electron Cash instead of Electrum to access your Bitcoin Cash. Once you get it imported, you can send it directly to exchanges that now accept deposits like Bittrex and Bitfinex.

You can download Electron Cash here electroncash.org.

There have been some concerns raised about how new the Electron Cash wallet is and how it hasn't gone through the normal vetting of cryptocurrency open source wallet software like many other projects do (and how the creator of the binary files is anonymous), so please use with caution. It's one of the reasons I suggest taking the approach I outlined to ensure your bitcoin is never at risk. So far, I haven't heard any reports of Electron Cash stealing any bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash. It worked perfectly for me as well, once I had the latest operating system updates on my computer.

I should also mention another approach I took was to download the Bitcoin Classic full client for BCC. That... took forever. Days later I had only managed to download about 25 gigs of the blockchain with much more to go. This reminded me how difficult it's going to be for normal people to run full nodes in the bitcoin ecosystem. Neither Bitcoin nor Bitcoin Cash make this any easier. Will this lead to centralization and existential risk? We'll leave that to a future post.

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please be careful to keep your BTC addresses separate from your BCC/BCH addresses. I'm not sure what will happen on the exchanges when people start accidentally sending one to the deposit address of the other. It could get messy. Most likely, you'll just lose your funds.

If you have any questions, please let me know. Before you ask, I don't know what the future price of Bitcoin Cash will be. I sold mine as soon as I got it to an exchange which was around $200. It's since gone up quite a bit from there, so maybe I sold at the bottom. I don't know what this Twitter reply from John McAfee means, but I think he's long Bitcoin Cash:

My hunch is the price will go down as more people get access to their BCH/BCC and figure out how to sell it. There may also be an influx to the market early next year as Coinbase distributes it to their users starting January 1st.

Then again, this could be the all time low and it may only go up from here.

Happy trading and good luck.


Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

I'm a Witness! Please vote for @lukestokes.mhth

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Just figured out how to do it for my case. I was holding BTC in Bitcoin Core.

I opened up Bitcoin Core -> Help -> Debug Window
In that window in the command line type: dumpprivkey YOURADDRESS
But swap the word YOURADDRESS with your bitcoin wallet address and then hit enter.
Next you will be presented with your private key. Save this some where very secure.

Next download and install http://www.electroncash.org/
When you are installing it will give you the option to restore your wallet using a private key. You simply copy the private key we got in the previous step and paste it in the box.

You finish the install and your balance should show the correct number of BCH coins in Electron Cash Wallet and you should still have your bitcoins BTC in your Bitcoin Core Wallet.

Nicely done! Thanks for sharing.

What would be the best btc wallet for a newbie like me (like most of us.. xD).
I'm just starting up here in the crypto world, any tips or advice would be really appreciated. ^u^

Well, there are all kinds, but one of the easiest may be https://www.exodus.io/ It's got a really clean interface and is easy to use.

Please watch my videos at https://understandingblockchainfreedom.com if you're just getting started. I think they will help you a lot, before you get a wallet installed.

Oh thank you for the speedy reply!
I do really need to have a lot of information about crypto, blockchain and other tech stuff. We lack information here in the Philippines, i'm grateful for the information and will check out your videos. Thank you so much Sir @lukestokes... :)

Neato! Thanks for the tip.

But my BTC was in paper wallet, I tried claiming free BCC using exodus, i couldn't. It says only 0 BCC can be transferred. My BTC was not in exodus wallet before the fork, is it because of that I can't claim free BCC?
Thanks :) @lukestokes

Oh, cool. Last I heard, Exodus did not support BCC. It seems they've updated their code as described here. Have you tried that? If it didn't work, I suggest contacting Exodus support.

You have to make sure you download the new exodus update that deals with claiming your bitcoin cash, but much better to just follow the instructions here.

I used coinomi to sweep wallet and it worked perfectly.
thanks :)

I think Exodus is rather nice, but I'd be a LOT happier if it was a HD wallet that didn't reuse addresses. Most coins you only get 1 address to use over and over or in the case of Bitcoin, you get 5 addresses to reuse. I also seem to recall that it isn't open source, but they are working towards that as a goal within contraints of their biz plan.

Hi @lukestokes! You have just received a 0.1 SBD tip from @emble!

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Hey Great Article!!
It was really useful and Informative!!
Thanks for posting such an impressive article...it totally inspired me..
I write articles on bitcoins and other stuffs would really appreciate if you would check them out and give your views on it..
Thanks and i already upvoted and followed you :)
Hope to get followed back.
Keep posting such great articles!!
Cheers!!

Great post but Im holding and I will wait for Jaxx or another big wallet to integrate BCH.

yep,    is the best!

Um, your private keys aren't crossed out completely. By looking at the top and bottom of the characters you can tell what they are...

(Please note, all of the addresses and keys used in these images are throw-aways for demonstration and not to be used by anyone. I covered them over just to make sure people don't even bother trying.)

I knew someone would post a comment like this. Sigh.

I'm sorry. I read too fast and I didn't see the disclaimer above.

No worries, I'm just bustin' you a bit. ;-)

Wow finally someone has explained this in detail. Well i just completed getting all of my btc off of my paper wallets and on to another btc wallet and also was able to get my bitcoin cash off of those private addresses and transfer the bitcoin cash into a new bitcoin cash wallet. Wow what a process but you exlained it very well it just takes time, and i almost lost one of my passwords and files in the process but everything came out find whewwwww almost messed it up big time. Thank you so much for taking the time to make these instructions for getting our bitcoin cash off of bitcoin paper wallets. I have not seen one other article dealing with this.

I'm really glad to hear it helped you out. :)

If you almost lost a password, it sounds like it's time to get a solid password manager in place. You can find out more in my videos at @ubf.

Great post Luke, but fyi theres a typo/autocorrect issue at the beginning "control the privacy key" ..

I still haven't touched my bcc , I wasn't fast enough to dump while it was higher so I think I'll hodl just in case it randomly moons in the future.

Ah, thank you so much! Will fix right now.

You may be making the right choice to HODL. I just got so frustrated watching the price come down from $700+, that once I got it all working, I dumped out of spite. Heheh. I hope to buy some back again in the future at a lower price.

Honestly I'm not going to hold my breath on it mooning anytime soon with the amount of sell pressure from people dumping their "free" tokens.. But this is crypto, stranger things have happened and its always nice to be given random lottery tickets like this :D

Indeed!

Insert 300 THIS IS CRYPTO! image here...

So tru @ausbitbank. Holding my Bitcoin Cash too... My Bitcoin is a long term investment anyways, so why not just keep the Bitcoin Cash stored on the original paper wallet anyways...
Maybe we'll see which direction they both take in the future. Playing it safe(er) ;)

I think that's a good plan. Maybe I'll get back into Bitcoin Cash, but for now I'm enjoying playing the market with some extra BTC spending money.

Make the extra bit work for you man ;)
I trade a little here and there - I use Luno in South Africa because there are no fees for market makers - worked amazing so far :)

Good topic. Wallets can be confusing and I remember a night of panicking. I have made a good amount of money because once I have money safely on a paper wallet I do not want to move it again. Kept me from selling where I thought there was a top (example: move from 600s to 1,000).

Nice. I did sell some at this recent all time high and it's only been going high, so I may regret that, but I didn't cash out, I just moved to "digital" USD and now I'm playing around with some other altcoins I've been thinking about getting for a while. It's a fun space to play. :)

A big Thank YOU for sharing this completely step by step guide how to safely get your Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash out of a paper wallet! I was just wondering: isn't it better to wait till segwit is active on the Bitcoin chain to do this? (To avoid a high fee to import your BTC?)... Great post!

You're welcome! If you're concerned about some small fees here or there while Bitcoin Cash is swinging hundreds of dollars, you may be penny wise and pound foolish. That said, waiting may make sense anyway, depending on which way the market swings.

That's true ;-) but the thing is I have multiple paperwallets, some of them are filled with only a small amount, and in that cases, the fees are just a to high % of the money on it... Besides that, it's just a personal issue I have with paying fees for this kind of "transactions". I've made some money with trading Bitcoin Cash the first day it came out (on Bittrex, bought 1 BCC +- 400 USD, sold it at around 1100USD) so the BCC I own because of the Bitcoin I owned at the moment of the fork is just for holding ;-)

Nice trade!

I think BCC will lead to saturation of the BITCOIN ij market place.

why?

Nowadays, people were upset with hardfork and recently the hero behind the WannaCry, ransomware was detained. Their actual ransom went through their multiple crypto wallets and thus it negatively impacted upon other civilians to get a threat from their Govt. This may lead to sharing of hands 👐 between 2

Maybe. It will be interesting to watch and see for sure.