Printing Paper Essentials

Did you know that you can use a home printer to make some incredibly useful and unique items? This blog post will show some of the great things that you can print. One of the most important things to print is paper - it's one of your largest expenses for printing and therefore makes sense to have it ready when you need it. While this list is not exhaustive, I hope that it helps when making your next printer purchase.

- Paper: White or cream cardstock, coated paper (preferably matte), recycled paper, business cards

- Ink: The color should be dye based with respect to your inkjet printer capabilities.

- Materials: Your printer, a cutting board or mat, and an X-acto knife (or similar for cardstock)

- Quantity: 1/2 of a ream of paper generally makes 100 paper wallets - your mileage may vary

- Time: The time is purely dependent on your skill. I can cut out 100 paper wallets in about 3 hours with these instructions.

There are many advantages to printing paper and having it cut to size because you have more control over the material use, thickness, colors, and ultimately the quality. Printed paper is also a way to show off your printer because it's something that not everyone has. Additionally, many places rent or sell recycled paper and it's often easy to find around town.

What I'm looking for:

- High quality inkjet printing (photo color is fine)

- Thickness: I don't mind the thickness of the print, but it shouldn't be too thin (I wouldn't want my cards to get ruined by ink). The thickness of the paper should also be sufficient.

- Colors: None - I really want them all black and white (some people would prefer a gradient color).

- Versatility: A single color like red, green, or blue is fine

- Durability: I don't mind the material being recycled paper (thanks to T.H. Southard for contributing this tip)

- Quality: Isn't too beat up that it's unreadable

- Price: I'd like the price to be a little under $0.50 per card - I'm going to use these as tinder for my fire and don't want to spend too much on them. Also, if they are in an envelope together they should cost less than $0.50 each (I have no idea how much 3 paper wallets cost in an envelope together).

What I don't want:

- Color: If you are using a different color ink than black and white, it should be hidden

- Anything else (except keeping the order small and not making more than 100 cards at a time).

How to make them:

- Print on cardstock (like the stuff Pokemon cards are made of) or coated paper - both work great. The coating is often matte for printing on coated paper. You may need to experiment with different types of paper until you find one that works well for you. It is worth mentioning that cardstock can be found at most office supply stores like Staples or Office Max. 

- Cut them out with an X-acto knife (or similar thin blade). Keep in mind that the edges will be rough and it will look like you didn't cut them all the way. I don't have an exact video of this, but here is a video of someone making paper wallets with an X-acto knife. If you want, you can use more than one X-acto knife to make a larger number (a trick I learned from reading various blog posts).

- If you want to make multiple colors or different sizes, just print out multiple copies of each part - they won't be perfect, but they should still work for most applications.

If you want to get really fancy - some people have made fish out of their wallets like this guy .

Who's using this?

I've received great feedback on this so I wanted to compile a list of people who are using this. I can't find their contact information and would love to get some feedback from them or the community.

- It seems like someone at Staples or Office Depot is printing these and selling them in stores. I've heard reports of being able to buy them in-store but it may be just one store that's doing this - please contact me if you know more about this.

- A lot of people have sent me photos of their setups where they are printing paper wallets on Flickr and Reddit. Here is a Flickr search for "Bitcoin paper wallet" .

- There seems to be a lot of people using this in their wallets.

- I found someone who made a Bitcoin paper wallet art project by printing out every private key possible. It would be cool if he could get some screenshots of his computer with all the wallets open. This person also had some interesting ideas on how to print different sizes and colors (something I'm not sure how you would do because of the cutting).

- I once saw someone make a duplicate paper wallet just by taking a picture of the front and back one with their phone and then reprinting it. This works surprisingly well - if you have an old smartphone, this might be something worth trying out. I'm interested to see how it looks with the ink on it.

Cheers, -z3nnir

#photo of a printed paper wallet holding a penny for scale. #not an actual paper wallet... pic.twitter.com/GPCePdoHbP — z3nnir (@z3nnir) December 27, 2014

If you are making these, let me know how they turn out! Comment below or email me: zachary@lowendtalk.com

If you have questions about this post, please comment below. If you're interested in contributing anything to this list, please comment on this post or email me: zachary@lowendtalk.com

If you want to contact me, here are some ways that I can be contacted:

Email: zachary@lowendtalk.com

Reddit: /r/BitcoinMining

Slack (for cryptocurrency-related chats): `zachary@lowendtalk.com` (replace the underscore with a dash) (https://zacharypilgrim.slack.com)

Email: zachary@lowendtalk.com

Twitter: @z3nnir (https://twitter.com/z3nnir)

If you found this post helpful, it would be super cool if you donated:

Bitcoin: 1LowEndBitcoinWWGnKjtnZ1CxSUn6Uq6h2HtFyT

Tip of the hat to /u/JohnDoe-22 for helping me improve this article by adding a few tips and some formatting. Any remaining formatting issues are probably his fault either way... though he did provide a nice picture at the top of this article which is A+ quality work.

Conclusion

If you're looking for these, they're either in the stores or online. Don't give up if you don't find paper wallets in your local stores - maybe there's only one store in your town. If online retailers do carry them, it's usually somewhere on their FAQ page or their product pages. Check the FAQs and product pages of these sites to see if they have paper wallets:

Cryptopia ( https://www.cryptopia.co.nz )

Fees: None.