Before the first Bitcoin fork (August 1st) I put all my Bitcoin into a paper wallet. I kind of forgot about it. Now I think I can claim Bitcoin cash as well. Now there has been another fork resulting in Bitcoin gold. How to I take my Bitcoin from the paper wallet and turn it into Bitcoin, bitcoin cash and Bitcoin gold?
Any step by step guides out there that anyone would know of?
Go to Blockchain.info
Sign up and after logging in, go to settings. Then in settings, you will see addresses as shown below:
Then click on Import Bitcoin Address as shown:
Then add your private key as it is in the form as shown:
Click import, and you will be able to use your BTC again.
Now to get Bitcoin Cash, just go to Settings > General
There you will see a button near this to claim your Bitcoin Cash as well:
Regarding Bitcoin Gold, it is still not officially started, and will update the answer once there is any secure way to access your Bitcoin Gold as well.
Please follow that and let me know if you were able to retrieve the coins.
Update:
For those who want to retrieve BTG, please head to Coinsutra for easy retrieval.
To claim your Bitcoin Gold you should follow these very simple steps.
To claim your Bitcoin Cash I found Electron Cash to be a very friendly option. You just need to follow steps similar to the Electrum Wallet: by using the New/Restore -> Creating a wallet -> Standard Wallet -> I already have a seed and then provide the seed with the BIP39 seed option checked.
If you want to exchange these coins to BTC I recommend you use Changelly.
ADVICE I suggest you first send your bitcoins to a new wallet and then do the steps above. This way you can be sure your bitcoins are completely safe.
This answer is not specific to paper wallets, but I believe it will work for them, or for any source wallet from which you can retrieve (a) private key(s).
The only well-tested and reliable wallets that I know of for BCH and BTG are the Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets and the Coinomi software wallet. Coinomi runs on the Android platform — usually phones and tablets.
However, you can run Coinomi without an Android device. Install the ARC Welder extension on a Chrome Browser, and download the wallet app, coinomi-1.7.10.apk, from https://coinomi.com/downloads
What I did:
(1) Moved my BTC from a local wallet on an internet-connected computer ("old wallet") to a secure offline wallet.
(2) Retrieved the private keys from the old wallet for any transaction in which BTC were received pre-fork(s) and which remained unspent at the time of the fork. (Retrieving a key for a non-qualifying transaction is harmless; at worst it will cost you a little extra effort, and Coinomi will "harvest" no BCH or BTG from it.) Because of step (1), exposure of these private keys to possible compromise (spying, hacking) risks only your BCH and BTG, not BTC.
(3) In Coinomi, created a new wallet for BCH and another new one for BTG. Separately for each of these new wallets, with each relevant private key from step (2), I selected the "Sweep wallet" command from the three-vertical-dots menu at the upper right of the screen and pasted in the private key. (Typing in the key rather than pasting is not only error-prone but runs into some issues with Coinomi-on-Chrome.)
A quirk in Coinomi-on-Chrome: the shortcut key for Paste (Ctrl-V or Cmd-V) may not work for pasting in a private key. Workaround: type any character or two, select what you've typed, and a "Paste" button pops up.
Background on what happens in Coinomi, or any wallet which imports private keys: the wallet software accesses the BTC blockchain and looks up any pre-fork BTC transaction (i.e., any BCH or BTG transaction, respectively) in which coins were sent to a (public) address associated with the private key you entered and which remained unspent at the time of the fork.
