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. That is why the card was handed to you closed, and why the first thing to do is move the money into a wallet that only you can open.
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.
So a gift card is a way to receive bitcoin, not a way to hold it. Both routes on this page end the same way: the coins land in a wallet whose words you wrote down yourself, or in your bank account. After that the card is a souvenir and can be shown 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.
They differ in one thing only: whether the words are typed into a device that can go online. The fast route is what almost everybody does, and for a gift-sized amount it is a reasonable trade. The offline route is what you would want if the card holds real money, or if you plan to keep the bitcoin rather than spend it.
You type the card's words into a well-known wallet app, see the balance, and send everything to a fresh wallet you made yourself.
You put the words into a computer that cannot go online, and only a finished, signed transaction ever crosses over on a USB stick.
The example below 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; the steps have the same shape in all of them. Get the app from the official app store listing or from the project's own site, and check the name letter by letter — fake wallets exist and they exist for exactly this moment.
Install it, open it once, and decline anything 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, separated by single spaces. If the card names a passphrase, enter it in the field the app offers for it — without it the same words open a different, empty wallet.
The app checks the words against the standard 2048-word list and refuses a mis-spelling, which is exactly what you want: a wallet that opens is a wallet you read correctly.
The amount on the card should appear within a few seconds. If it says zero, do not panic and do not re-type anything yet — go to Trouble: nine times out of ten it is an address-type setting, not a lost coin.
In the same app, create a new wallet. Write its words on paper, in order, and keep that paper the way you would keep the equivalent in cash. Nobody has ever seen those words — that is the whole difference between it and the card.
If you would rather not keep money on a phone at all, this is the moment to use a hardware wallet, or the offline route, and send the gift straight there.
Copy a receive address from your new wallet, paste it into a send from the gift wallet, and choose send max / use full balance so nothing is left behind. A normal fee is fine; there is no hurry.
Wait for one confirmation — usually minutes, occasionally an hour. When it confirms, the money is behind words that only you know, and the card is empty.
Delete the imported gift wallet from the app if you like — it holds nothing now. Keep the card as a keepsake, or destroy it. Either is safe once the transaction has confirmed.
That the app is the real one, and that the phone is not compromised. Both are usually true, and for a birthday-sized gift moved the same day the risk is small — but it is not zero, and it is the reason the offline route exists.
Until the sweep confirms, the giver could in principle spend the coins first. Not a reason for fear; a reason not to leave the card in a drawer for a year.
Bitcoin becomes ordinary money at an exchange: you send coins in, sell them for your local currency, and withdraw to your bank. Every country has different exchanges and different rules, so this page names none — pick one that operates legally where you live, that people around you have actually used, and that supports your bank.
If you intend to cash out straight away, you can send from the gift wallet directly to the exchange and skip a transaction fee. If you want to keep some bitcoin, do the sweep in section 03 first and send from your own wallet.
Fees are per transaction, not per amount. Moving 20 units of currency worth of bitcoin 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.
An exchange is not a wallet. Money left sitting on one is held by the exchange, not by you. Sell and withdraw, or keep it in your own wallet — pick one.
SignerOS is a free system on a USB stick that turns a computer you already own into an offline signing device. It has no network stack at all, it never touches the machine's hard drives, and it forgets everything when you switch it off. Transactions cross between it and your everyday computer as files on a second USB stick — never as a connection. What it is and how to get it →
On this route you do two things at once: 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 without the card's words ever reaching an online machine.
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 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.