📺Retro Paper Wallet

Why a themed paper wallet?

The standard paper wallet generator outputs a clinical, bitaddress-style card. It works, but it's boring. A themed card turns cold storage into something you actually want to keep, something you can hand to a friend without explaining what a WIF is.

The Retro card is designed to look like a CRT terminal readout from the 1980s — phosphor-green type (shown here in the site's black-and-white variant), scanlines, ASCII art borders, hazard-striped warning bands across the private-key flap. It's printable, foldable, and instantly recognizable.

Workflow

1. Generate a keypair offline

   Use paper.motacoin.net on an air-gapped machine to generate a fresh keypair (Single tab, optionally BIP38-encrypted). Save the page, disconnect, generate, copy the public address and private WIF.

2. Open retropaper.motacoin.net

   Can also be saved offline the same way — File → Save page as… and open locally on the air-gapped machine for the rendering step.

3. Paste the keypair into the two fields

   • Public Address — starts with M, goes into the upper half of the card
   • Private Key (WIF) — starts with K, L, or 6P (if BIP38), goes into the lower half under the flap

4. Pick a serial number + label

   Optional fields — show up on the card as SERIAL: RPW-0420-XXXXX and a one-line label of your choice (e.g., "Long-term cold storage · 2026").

5. Click Render

   The card renders live in the preview pane. It looks like a CRT readout — green phosphor text on black, scanlines, ASCII art header, two QR codes (public address on top, private WIF on bottom under the flap).

6. Print

   Ctrl+P or Cmd+P. The print CSS hides everything except the card — the rest of the page won't make it to paper. Print on heavy card stock for longevity (24-lb or heavier). Black-and-white laser is fine; the CRT aesthetic works in monochrome.

7. Fold along the hazard stripe

   The card is printed as one long strip. Fold along the diagonal hazard-striped band — this covers the private-key QR. A small strip of tamper-evident tape across the fold turns it into a proper one-time-open package.

8. Vault it

   Safe, safe-deposit box, sealed envelope in a fireproof box. If you made multiple copies (recommended — one for daily storage, one in a second physical location), log each serial number so you know which copies exist.

Verifying the card after print

Before you send funds to the address, verify the printed QR actually decodes to the address you intended:

# Any phone camera or QR app on the printed public QR should show the M-prefix address.
# If you have zbarimg:
$ zbarimg --quiet --raw public-qr.png
MNCfNkGJuku1DLtVHeimVVLCtfk2YWKq8c

Once verified, send a small test amount (say, 1 MOTA), confirm it on explorer.motacoin.net, then send the real balance.

Recovery / sweep later

When you want to spend:

1. Break the tamper seal (this is your "I'm about to use this" signal)
2. Scan the private-key QR into MotaCoin Core (Debug Console → importprivkey "WIF") or a web wallet
3. Sweep the entire balance to a fresh address in your hot wallet — never send just some
4. Shred or burn the card. Paper wallets are one-time-use by design.

Ideas for using it

• Birthday gift — load a Retro card with 1,000 MOTA, hand it over in a sleeve with instructions, let them learn by doing
• Merchant giveaways — Bulk + Retro combined: generate 100 wallets, render 100 cards, hand out at events
• Long-term personal cold storage — the theme makes it pleasant to look at in a drawer; the hazard flap makes tampering obvious
• Institutional "dead-drop" setups — printed card + instructions sealed in a box opened only on a specific date or condition