Selling your Bitcoin Gold from a Bitcoin Paper Wallet using only an iPhone and Mac
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I have bitcoins stored on paper wallets that I created a few years ago and wanted to sell the associated bitcoin gold which ended up being more complicated than anticipated, so I wanted to detail my journey in case it helps others who may want to do the same.
If you have had a bitcoin paper wallet for any length of time then the paper wallet contains keys that hold bitcoin, bitcoin cash, and bitcoin gold amongst other forks and snapshots. Redeeming and separating these coins presents a challenge: The private key is the same for each of them, so any software you expose the private key to could steal all of them.
First you expose your private key to move the bitcoins, then bitcoin cash, then bitcoin gold. I used this order because each step poses more risks of losing your coins, and so moving the coins by order of value minimizes the odds that coins will be stolen or lost.
This removed the bitcoins from the paper wallet. Once I confirmed the bitcoins had been moved, I focused on bitcoin cash. Now came the challenging part: Bitcoin gold team security is highly questionable and I found a number of instances where recommended wallets had stolen funds from users. HereHereand Here. Lastly, I wanted to make sure that I did not permanently compromise my computer or phone in the process and perhaps lose other cryptocurrency due to that in the future.
After looking at Bitpie reviews and seeing that a user said it stole their money on the only English review in the iOS App Store, I decided I could not trust it. At the time of writing, that is the only iOS wallet available that bitcoingold. Bitcoin gold core wallet currently does not support Mac and they list no supported Mac wallets at all. I first went down the path of setting up a VMWare Fusion Ubuntu virtual machine and then attempting to install bitcoin gold core, but I discovered this approach would take a lot of time and more hard drive space than I was happy with.
The blockchain torrent is over GB, so I gave up on that approach. Unfortunately the camera emulation in NOX did not work on my mac and so I had to manually type in the paper wallet private key.
Regardless, it worked, and I was almost immediately able to send my bitcoin gold from Coinomi to my Bittrex account where I could then sell it for something else.
This article was originally posted on Medium and can be found here. Private keys are precious If you have had a bitcoin paper wallet for any length of time then the paper wallet contains keys that hold bitcoin, bitcoin cash, and bitcoin gold amongst other forks and snapshots. Finally I had isolated the paper wallet to only bitcoin gold Now came the challenging part: Then it got more complicated than I had expected After looking at Bitpie reviews and seeing that a user said it stole their money on the only English review in the iOS App Store, I decided I could not trust it.
VMWare Fusion running Linux to install the bitcoin gold core wallet I first went down the path of setting up a VMWare Fusion Ubuntu virtual machine and then attempting to install bitcoin gold core, but I discovered this approach would take a lot of time and more hard drive space than I was happy with.
