Sweeping ETH from a 2 year old paper wallet, help?

Question

I have a paper wallet from an ETH atm from 2 years ago. I am trying to sweep the funds onto a digital wallet. I have used multiple ETH wallet apps on my phone but none of them were able to recognize my private key. The public key functions properly and I am able to access it with etherscan.

The ETH atm support I reached out to stated that the blockchain for ETH has changed much in the past 2 years and therefore my keys are outdated. Supposedly it is possible to translate my private key into wallet compatible format. Support said I could get a trusted programmer to do this for me. I'm not sure what to think of this. There seem to be no people with the same issue as me online. Maybe the ETH atm I purchased from uses a proprietary format?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Private key is always private key - the format never changes.

There are, however, other ways hows a private key can be derived - for example from a seed phrase. And that format may vary. But if you say you have the private key then it should be the private key - the only thing that might vary in it is whether it has the prefix "0x" in front of it or not. The prefix "0x" simply denotes that the following string is in hexadecimal format.

Here's an example of a private key I found online: 8da4ef21b864d2cc526dbdb2a120bd2874c36c9d0a1fb7f8c63d7f7a8b41de8f . So this may also be written as 0x8da4ef21b864d2cc526dbdb2a120bd2874c36c9d0a1fb7f8c63d7f7a8b41de8f .

Don't trust any random guy on the internet with your private key, no matter what. Do your own research and use popular open source tools to access your funds yourself.