Paper in this context is a form of cold storage, you could get very similar results encoding the information on magnetic tape or on a hard drive stored in a saf

Paper in this context is a form of cold storage, you could get very similar results encoding the information on magnetic tape or on a hard drive stored in a safe. Cold storage turns the information security problem into a physical security problem. The catch comes when you need to use this information regularly, say to issue bank cards. Now you need protocols for regularly circumventing that physical security and correctly using/distributing the information, making it in essence an information security problem again.