On the card is a list of words, written by hand. Those words are a Bitcoin wallet: whoever can read them can spend what is in it — and somebody already wrote them, so at least two people have now seen them. A secret two people know is not a secret. So there is one thing you have to do, and this page is only about which one.
A gift card is a wallet that was created by somebody else. They wrote the words on the card by hand, which means the words passed in front of their eyes — and possibly in front of a printer, a table, a room, a camera nobody thought about. The card is yours, but the secret behind it was never only yours.
That is the whole reason this page exists. A wallet is only as private as the number of people who could open it, and this one has always had at least two: you, and whoever filled the card in. A secret two people know is not a secret. They almost certainly mean you no harm — that is not the point. The point is that you cannot tell, and you never will be able to, so a gift card is a way to receive bitcoin and not a way to hold it.
So doing nothing is the one answer with a real cost. Everything else on this page ends the same way: the coins are somewhere the card can no longer reach — your bank account, or a wallet whose words only you have ever seen — and the card becomes a keepsake you can show to anybody.
1. Treat the card like cash. Anyone holding it can take the money. Keep it closed and out of sight until you redeem it.
2. Type the words only into a wallet app you installed yourself — from the official app store listing or the wallet's own site — or into an offline signer. Never into a page that a link, an email or a message brought you to.
3. Nobody legitimate will ever ask for the words. Not support, not an exchange, not the person who gave you the card, not this page. There is no input box anywhere on this site, and there never will be.
4. Do not photograph or upload the card. A photo in a phone gallery is a copy in somebody else's cloud.
// If the amount on the card is small, it is still worth doing this properly — but see what to do about fees first: moving a very small amount can cost more than it holds, and then leaving it on the card until it is worth moving is the sensible answer rather than the lazy one.
Answer this before you touch the card, because the two answers need different things from you. It is not really a question about bitcoin — it is a question about what you want the money to be.
You would like this as ordinary money: in your bank account, or spent on something. Bitcoin is a step on the way, not the destination.
You would like to hold bitcoin. Then the first job is not the card at all: it is a wallet of your own, because the card is not one.
Pick keep it. It settles the urgent half — the coins stop being reachable by anybody but you — and decides nothing permanent: selling later, from your own wallet, works exactly the same way, and by then the card is out of the story.
What you should not pick is later. The card is the one arrangement where waiting has a cost.
Three things happen in order: you open the card's wallet on your phone, you send the coins to an exchange, and the exchange turns them into your local currency and sends that to your bank. Nothing here needs a wallet of your own — the card is emptied in one move, which is what makes this route acceptable despite the words having been seen.
The example uses BlueWallet, because it is free, well known and asks for nothing but the words. Sparrow on a desktop, Nunchuk, Blockstream Green or Electrum do the same job and the steps have the same shape. Install it from the official app store listing or the project's own site and check the name letter by letter — fake wallets exist, and they exist for exactly this moment.
Open it once and decline everything optional: no cloud backup, no screenshots, no “save to photos”. You are about to type a secret into this app, and you do not want a copy of it leaving the phone.
Type the words in the order they are numbered on the card, all lower case, single spaces. If the card names a passphrase, put it in the field the app offers for it — without it the same words open a different, empty wallet.
The app checks every word against the standard 2048-word list and refuses a mis-spelling, which is exactly what you want: a wallet that opens at all is a wallet you read correctly.
The amount should appear within a few seconds. If it says zero, do not re-type anything yet and do not panic — go to Trouble: nine times out of ten it is an address-type setting, not a lost coin. If the card carries a fingerprint, this is where it should match what the app shows.
Pick an exchange that operates legally where you live, that people around you have actually used, and that can pay out to your bank. This page names none: every country has different ones and different rules. Expect an ID document and a selfie, and get all of that done before you send any coins, not after.
This is the one screen on the whole route where a wrong click loses the money, so it has a box of its own below. Copy the address by paste or QR only — never re-type a bitcoin address — and check the minimum deposit while you are there: many exchanges silently swallow anything below a threshold.
Choose send max / use full balance so nothing is left behind, and compare the first and last four characters of the address after pasting. A normal fee is fine; there is no hurry. Then wait for the exchange to credit it — it decides how many confirmations, usually one to three blocks, so minutes to an hour.
Sell the bitcoin for your currency, then withdraw to your bank account. Expect a trading fee, possibly a withdrawal fee, and a bank transfer that may take a day. Do not leave the money sitting on the exchange: an exchange is not a wallet, and what is on one is held by them, not by you.
Write down what you received, what you sold it for, and when. Many countries tax the gain between the two, and the exchange's own statement is what you will be asked for.
Delete the imported gift wallet from the app if you like — it holds nothing now. Keep the card as a keepsake or destroy it; both are safe once the transaction has confirmed.
An exchange's deposit screen asks two questions that look like the same question. The first is which coin and which network. The answer is Bitcoin's own network, and nothing else on the list is it:
✓ Bitcoin · BTC · on-chain ✗ Lightning ✗ BEP-20 / BSC ✗ ERC-20 / wrapped BTC ✗ Any other chain
Those others are separate rails that happen to have “BTC” in the name. An ordinary send to one of them does not bounce — it is simply gone, and no support desk can reverse it.
The second question is which address format, and the answer there is SegWit — often written Native SegWit, bech32, or shown as an address beginning bc1q. That is the format the gift wallet itself is built around, and it is the cheapest to send to. If the exchange offers Legacy (1…) or SegWit-compatible (3…) instead, they do work — you just pay more fee for the privilege. If it offers no choice at all, the address it gives you is the right one.
Read the address out of the app you are sending from, too. If your wallet shows a warning that the destination is on another network, stop and re-read this box rather than tapping through it.
Fees are per transaction, not per amount. Moving a small gift can cost a noticeable slice of it when the network is busy. Check the fee the app proposes before confirming, and if it is absurd, wait a day — fees fall.
The price moves. What the card says was put in is what it was worth then. It may be worth more or less today; neither is a mistake, and neither is anybody's fault.
The identity checks take longer than the bitcoin part. If they drag on for days, the card is sitting there with its secret known the whole time — in that case do keep it first, into a wallet of your own, and sell from there when the account is ready.
Keeping bitcoin on the gift card is the one thing this page argues against, and it has nothing to do with the card being paper. It is that the words were written by a hand that was not yours. So the order matters: your own wallet has to exist before the gift moves anywhere. Make it first, empty the card into it second.
Two ways, and they differ in one thing: whether your new words are ever typed into a device that can go online. Both give you a real wallet that nobody else has ever seen the words of.
A self-custody wallet app — BlueWallet, Nunchuk, Blockstream Green, Electrum on a desktop — creates the wallet on the device and shows you its words once. Write them on paper straight away; that paper is the wallet.
SignerOS is a free system on a USB stick that turns a computer you already own into an offline wallet machine. It has no network stack at all, never touches the machine's hard drives, and forgets everything when you switch it off.
// Either way, check that what you made is self-custody: the app showed you a
list of words and asked you to write them down. If it only ever showed you an email
login, it is an account at a company, not a wallet, and moving the gift there is
swapping one stranger for another.
// Going the SignerOS way and want the card's words never to touch a phone
either? Then do the fully offline route
instead of step two below — it does both halves on the offline machine.
This is where the card's words are typed in, on the phone, and it is a one-way trip: the wallet you are about to open is temporary and worth nothing afterwards.
In the wallet you just made, tap Receive and copy the address it shows — it begins bc1q. Keep it on the clipboard, or better, in front of you on the SignerOS screen or a piece of paper. This is where the gift is going.
Same as the spend route: the words in their numbered order, all lower case, plus the passphrase if the card names one. The gift's balance appears. If the card carries a fingerprint, check it here.
Give this wallet a name like gift — temporary if the app lets you. It is not your wallet and it is not meant to survive the evening.
Choose send max / use full balance so nothing is left behind, and compare the first and last four characters of the address after pasting. Both wallets are on the Bitcoin network, so there is no network to choose here — only the address, and it must be one your own wallet showed you.
The amount appears in your own wallet within minutes, occasionally an hour. Once it has one confirmation, delete the temporary gift wallet from the app: its words are worthless now, and that is the point. The money is behind words that nobody has ever seen but you.
The app can be deleted, the phone can be lost or replaced — the words on your paper are what restores the wallet. Keep that paper the way you would keep the same amount in cash: somewhere dry, somewhere private, and not photographed. There is a printable sheet for it that fetches nothing and can be printed from the offline machine.
The gift card's words were seen by somebody else and cannot be un-seen, so the money behind them was never entirely yours. The words you wrote in step one were shown once, on a screen you were holding, and written by your own hand. That is the difference the whole exercise buys, and it lasts as long as the paper does.
This is keep it done to the end. In section 04 your own words never touch a network, but the card's words are typed into a phone — and for a gift-sized amount, moved the same evening, that is a reasonable trade. Here even that is avoided: the card's words go into a machine that cannot go online, and only a finished, signed transaction ever crosses over on a USB stick.
SignerOS is the free system that makes the machine. It has no network stack at all, it never touches the computer's hard drives, and it forgets everything when you switch it off. What it is and how to get it → You will also need one wallet program on your everyday computer to watch balances and build the transaction — Sparrow in the steps below — which never sees a secret.
Two things happen at once on this route: you create a wallet of your own, whose words are written on paper and have never been anywhere near a network, and you empty the gift card into it with the card's words never reaching an online machine either.
Write those words on paper and keep no other copy — that paper is the wallet. There is a printable sheet for it: the recovery sheet. SignerOS then writes one watch-only file of public keys to the stick's PSBT_DATA drive. It cannot spend anything, so it is safe to carry.
Open the watch-only file in Sparrow (or any wallet that imports output descriptors). This is now the destination: it can show balances and build transactions, and it holds nothing secret. Copy one of its receive addresses and keep it to hand.
Type the card's words — and its passphrase, if it has one — into the offline machine. It derives the same public keys the giver's wallet has and writes a second watch-only file. The words are wiped from memory when you leave the screen, and nothing derived from them is written anywhere.
The review page shows a fingerprint and the first address. If the card carries a fingerprint, this is where the two must match.
Load the second file into Sparrow as well. The gift balance appears. Select all of its coins, send them to the address from step 02 with send max, and save the transaction as a .psbt file onto the PSBT_DATA drive instead of signing it — there is nothing here that could sign it.
SignerOS shows what the transaction actually pays and to whom, refuses anything whose fee it cannot determine, and only then asks for the words. Check that the destination is your own address and that the amount is the whole gift. Sign, and the signed file is written back to the stick.
Open the signed file in Sparrow and broadcast it. Once it confirms, delete the temporary gift wallet: its words are now worthless, and the money sits behind the words on your own paper.
Both times they go into a machine that has no network stack compiled into it, no drivers for your disks, and no storage of its own — it runs from RAM and loses everything at power-off. The only thing that ever leaves it is a file you named, and that file contains public keys or a signed transaction.
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| The balance is zero, but the card says there should be something | Most often the app is looking at the wrong address type. A SignerOS gift is normally funded on the addresses that begin bc1q (Native SegWit, m/84'/0'/0'). Re-import and choose that type, or let the app scan all of them. Then check the fingerprint: if it does not match the card, a word was read wrong — most often a/o, rn/m, or a missing final letter. |
| The app rejects the words | One of them is not in the standard list, or the last word does not match the checksum built into the rest. Re-read your handwriting: the list has no proper nouns, no capitals and no words shorter than three letters. Every word is unique in its first four letters, so those four decide it. |
| The card mentions a passphrase | Then it is part of the secret: enter it exactly, including capitals and spaces. The words without it open a valid, empty wallet — which looks exactly like a wrongly-copied word. If the passphrase is lost, the money is lost; ask the giver while they still remember. |
| The exchange asks which network to deposit on | Answer Bitcoin — the coin's own network, sometimes written BTC or on-chain. If it then asks for an address format, take SegWit / bech32, the address beginning bc1q. Lightning, BEP-20, ERC-20 and “wrapped” BTC are different rails: an ordinary send to one of them is not bounced back, it is lost. There is a box about exactly this screen. |
| You are not sure the wallet you made is really yours | The test is one question: did it show you a list of words and ask you to write them down? If yes, it is self-custody and the words are the wallet. If it only asked for an email and a password, it is an account at a company — moving the gift there swaps one stranger for another and adds a login you can be locked out of. |
| The coins left the gift wallet but have not arrived | Look at the receiving side, not the sending side. An exchange credits a deposit only after the confirmations it requires, and only if the deposit is above its minimum. Your own wallet shows an incoming payment straight away, usually as “pending”. If both show nothing after an hour, check the address you actually sent to — the first and last four characters against the one you copied. |
| The fee is a large share of the gift | Fees depend on how busy the network is, not on the amount. Wait for a quieter day — weekends are often cheaper — or leave it where it is until you actually need it. If the amount is truly tiny, sweeping it may never be economic; treat the card as the keepsake it is. |
| The card is years old | Bitcoin does not expire and neither do the words. An old card is fine; the amount is simply worth whatever it is worth today. |
| You think somebody else has seen the words | Move the money now, by whichever route you can do fastest. Speed beats elegance: a sweep into a phone wallet you make in two minutes is better than a perfect offline setup next weekend. |
| The card is lost, or was thrown away with the wrapping | Then the wallet cannot be opened by anyone, including you. There is no reset, no support line and no recovery — this is the part of bitcoin that has no customer service. Search the bin. |
No legitimate site has a box for them — including this one. A page that asks is stealing, however official it looks.
Not to the giver, not to “support”, not to a friend who offers to help. Help can be given without the words.
The photo syncs to a cloud, the cloud has an account, the account has a password. You have just made your bitcoin as strong as that password.
The classic theft of gift-card bitcoin is a helpful stranger watching the words being typed in.
A gift card is only a real gift if the words end up in exactly one place: on the card. That is easy to get wrong, so here is the whole discipline in seven lines. There is a printable card to fill in: the gift card sheet — pick the occasion, type the name and the note, print it blank and write the words by hand.
// Doing it the other way round — buying on an exchange and sending to an address the receiver gives you — is also perfectly good, and needs no card at all. The card is for when you want the gift to be a physical thing that works even if you are not around to explain it.