A quick and dirty port of Carlos Bueno's bitcoin-printer python script, which generates "paper Bitcoins" which contain one-time-use keypairs and Bitcoin payment addresses.

See also: http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/07/paper-bitcoins.html

[email protected] 17 July 2012

BSD license: Share and enjoy, but give credit where it's due.

[email protected] 17 November 2013

BSD license: Share and enjoy, but give credit where it's due.

As of yet, it has only been tested and verified to work with:

• Ruby 2.0.0

You will need ImageMagick, and it's development libraries set up for your OS.

After that, make sure you have bundler installed and then, run:

bundle install

That should get you all set up to run the script.

You'll probably need Ghostscript, which you can helpfully grab with brew.

$ ./paper_bitcoin.rb AMOUNT

where AMOUNT is a decimal number like "0.1". The default is "0.001". This will create a new keypair and bitcoin address, and generate the front and back images for printing complete with QR codes and text. The filename will be in the form "iSamPLE-front.png", where "iSamPLE" is the newly-minted Bitcoin address.

Remember to actually send the Bitcoin to that address!

I developed using a Virtualbox-based 64-bit Ubuntu Precise Vagrant box. I've included my Vagrantfile and Berksfile in case anyone wants to pick up exactly where I left off.

To set up, you'll need:

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant
• Berkshelf -- i.e. gem install berkshelf
• Vagrant-Berkshelf -- i.e. vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf
• Vagrant-Omnibus -- i.e. vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus

Once all of that is set up: vagrant up

After several minutes (the chef-solo run alone can take about 15 minutes), that will get your VM spun up and ready to roll. You can SSH into the running VM with: vagrant ssh

You can access the script (and all other files in your host's directory) at: /vagrant

To suspend the VM and free up your system resources without having to rebuild the whole VM from scratch: vagrant suspend If you really want to just delete the VM, then: vagrant destroy