I haven't done it in the past neither I plan to do it in the near future, but is a good idea though. To generate a brand new vanity address or use the free/cheap services here or generate yourself from a clean pc. If you give them an address with the private key you can always hold the private key and sell if price crashes but anyway this is a present. I would give as present a physical bitcoin and the vanity address.

What vanity gen are you using? and yes i have done it for my kids tho i didnt bother with a vanity address i just got an address off of bitaddress.

As far as I know there is only one vanitygenerator and you should have a good cpu/gpu to get faster the vanityaddress (with 4-5 characters as prefix mostly) but also people are offering a part private key for your vanity address which sometimes can be free sometimes cost a little bit.


My pleasure.

Ooh, a USB copy - I hadn't thought of that!  I guess USB drives can deteriorate over time though, and who knows how storage tech will progress.  Everything I considered important in my youth is trapped on floppy disks that I'll never access again    It's worth considering though.


I've used Vanitygen a couple of times now and my CPU can generate an address from a 4-digit prefix in a few seconds, still well under a minute for 5-digits.  I've also practised generating a paper wallet offline.

Obviously I'd love it to be worth a lot more by the time she opens it, but my main concern is that I don't want it to turn out to be a worthless piece of paper   Ideally it will be a nice little egg for her and spark an interest in cryptography at the same time.

Honestly this is so unique.  I love the idea and think it would work out perfectly.   It's basically the same thing as setting her up a saving account with the bank, instead you are doing it with Bitcoin. 

Well, i think it's unnecessary for the baby. Because the baby don't know about bitcoin and the parents can use that bitcoin. But it's really unique gift for a baby and extraordinary.

Baby can not appreciate that at the moment i think it is good to give a milk or diaper because that is very useful for the baby while bitcoin that was good to gift for the teenager and up they can use it anywhere they want.

About long-term is too bad, because you don't need what happened in the future, it's not a predicted or speculating but better for giving him goods it's useful for him like a doll and another thing is can be useful for him because he are a baby and it's too fast for think about long term.

As a baby, she will not appreciate that as a gift. But she will when she reaches the right age.
How lucky for a woman, she grows up with tons of money.  

If it is properly generated?  Yes.


It's much better than a lottery ticket.  If bitcoin reaches mainstream use in her lifetime, she'll be absolutely amazed at your foresight and extremely thankful for your generosity.  If bitcoin fails and disappears into a footnote in financial textbooks, then she'll be mildly entertained at your naivete and gullibility.  Either way its a fun gift that will come up in conversations years later.


I've helped both my sister and my father put some bitcoins into cold storage back in 2013.  Both of them plan to just ignore the daily fluctuations.  If there is suddenly enough value to retire early, they'll cash out (or simply start spending bitcoin if it has REALLY gone mainstream.  If it never reaches that value (or collapses completely), the money is already out of mind and considered "spent", so nobody will be devastated at the loss.


Your biggest concern will probably be that the piece of paper could either get lost, damaged, or the ink could fade and become unusable.
The next concern would be someone getting a hold of the paper wallet that decides to take the bitcoins without permission (family member, future boyfriend, etc).

Assuming that the paper wallet is created in a secure manner, and that it lasts 15+ years, and that the bitcoins haven't been stolen before your niece can access them...

You might want to think about whether you (or anyone else in the family) will want to contribute additional bitcoins in the future.  My suggestion would be to generate new paper wallets for each gift in the future and not to re-use the existing address.  That will make it easier to cash in just some of the gifts without risking the others, and if any of the paper wallets are ever created on a compromised computer, it will only effect that one gift and not all the others.

One other thing to keep aware of is how technology advances over the next decade or two.  Occasionally technology can make sudden leaps and if a mathematical weakness is discovered in ECDSA or any of the hashing algorithms that bitcoin uses, then bitcoin could transition to a new address format.  If that happens, old addresses would almost certainly still be valid, but they might not be as secure.  You'd want to generate a new address using the new address system and send the bitcoins from the paper wallets to the new address system to keep them safe.