There’s a little known bug involving paper wallets and the BIP38 password that unlocks them. Early cryptos such as Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE) where frequently stored using paper wallets.
Paper wallets were the earliest type of wallet used to store Bitcoin. They literally were a piece of paper containing the wallet address and the private key encrypted with the BIP38 standard. Paper wallets were created by sites like https://www.bitaddress.org/ and https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/. Creating a paper wallet today is not recommended as there are far safer and easier ways to store your crypto, eg. by using a hardware wallet such as a Trezor, Nano or Tangem.
I was recently contacted by a client who had created their paper wallet several years ago using a Mac running the Safari browser and the bitaddress.org web site. According to this thread https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org/issues/56, there is a bug when using Safari 6.0.5 where the BIP38 details are translated incorrectly. This is obviously a serious problem for anyone who created their wallet using the Safari browser version 6.0.5.
It seems the only way to recover the crypto in these situations is to source an old Mac running Mountain Lion and the Safari 6.0.5 browser. I have done this and replicated the failure conditions.
If you have Bitcoin or Litecoin stored on a paper wallet and are having this problem, please contact me as I should be able to help.
