Quote from: raid_n on December 04, 2013, 11:19:57 PM

Quote from: BittBurger on December 04, 2013, 06:04:33 PM

Quote from: UnDerDoG81 on December 04, 2013, 10:00:39 AM

You have to move all your Bitcoins from your paper wallet to your real wallet or the BTCs on the paper wallet get lost Shocked

Who really can know this? You try to move 1 BTC from your paper to your BTC wallet and lose 99 Coins or ~110.000$ because you dont know this information.

I don't know who said this but its wrong.

Nothing happens to coins on a paper wallet. You probably read the sentence wrong. He probably said you *could* lose something that is on paper.

Meaning, its possible to misplace it. The coins don't sometimes "get lost" from paper wallets.

In fact, the coins aren't really there. They aren't anywhere. The blockchain is an accounting ledger, documenting where the wealth is.

The wealth is virtual. The paper wallet just houses the private key. And its the private key that unlocks your ability to move the coins from their location documented in the ledger.

There are no coins on your paper wallet, and they can't be lost.

Actually it is possible to lose coins. Here is the scenario: You have paper wallet P1 with a public key P1pub and a private key P1priv containing 1 BTC.
You fill that walled by transferring funds from somewhere else to the public address P1pub. Two months later you decide it is time to spend some of that BTC given the value has at least doubled ( ;-) ).
You import your private key P1priv in bitcoin-qt and tada, the amount of bitcoins stored in your paper wallet are now added to your digital wallet. You then proceed to spend from the added address P1, say 0.1 btc from the 1 BTC of P1. The expected result is that P1 now contains 0.9 BTC. This however is usually not the case. The reason is that usually the wallet software will place the remaining 0.9 BTC into a new address P2 for extra anonymity. So your input from P1 gets split to two outputs: The destination to which you are sending 0.1 BTC and P2 to where you are sending the remainder (actually the difference between the input and the two outputs will be the miner's fee and if you fail to specify a second output for the remainder the miner who found the block receive all of it). Some wallet software will let you specify the remainder address as P1pub, essentially placing the remainder back into the paper wallet but since you have had to use the private key of that address it might be compromised.
Back to the scenario: If you used your wallet software and were unaware that it places the remainder into P2 you might wrongfully assume the paper wallet contains the remainder in P1. You now delete (really, don't ever delete a wallet unless you know what the hell you are doing) the wallet software thinking your online business is done and all is swell. P2 gets deleted along with the private key for P2 so yes, your money is now gone.

Now what do we learn from this? a) Use paper wallets as one time vouchers and once they are digitized destroy them. (and create a new one to where you transfer the remainder) b) don't delete wallets unless you are more than sure that there is nothing you can lose c) who said printing your own money did not at least require a tiny bit of research

Obviously there are many ways to "lose" coins. Like leaving your hard drive with 7 million dollars worth, in a Landfill.

But his comment was: "You have to move all your Bitcoins from your paper wallet to your real wallet or the BTCs on the paper wallet get lost"

You can't lose coins this way.

As long as he has his paper wallet and his private and public key, he isn't going to "lose" his coins if they don't get moved to a "real wallet" (whatever that means).