What's the best self hosted bitcoin solution? Basically I want to buy bitcoins without revealing my identity. reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ganjaptics · 2023-11-28 11:33 There's nothing to host. Generate a wallet and buy it with cash in person. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Simplixt · 2023-11-28 11:36 And you want to pay your bitcoin with unicorn dust, or how do you think this will work? \^\^ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gotamm · 2023-11-28 11:59 Robosats ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bababradford · 2023-11-28 13:32 I don’t think you understand how bitcoin works. Or your trolling. Not sure which. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- borg286 · 2023-11-28 15:12 It is possible to run a Bitcoin miner, which will only be cost efficient with a really nice GPU. But mining Bitcoin only earns money by appending a transaction at the end of a leger moving Bitcoin into a wallet. Even if you have a wallet you will eventually want to turn that into real money. Those exchanges require an account with them tied to your real identity. The transaction can then be traced back to the wallet where the miner deposited the coin. There may be some hoops you can jump through, but the leger being public makes it possible to find crooks when they try to cash out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-28 15:27 I thought something like this would make it work. I think I can send money from Paypal to someone on that network, and they'll sell be bitcoin. https://bisq.network/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-28 16:16 I don't want to cash out. I want to donate anonymously to private trackers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fossilsforall · 2023-11-28 18:11 And that person will have your identity... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-28 18:25 I don't really care at this point tbh. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fossilsforall · 2023-11-28 18:35 Ok then buy it on an exchange and send it to a wallet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-28 18:37 So I can't pay with Bisq? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fossilsforall · 2023-11-28 18:43 Hello! Bisq is an exchange. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mpember · 2023-11-28 21:07 Step One: Underpants Step Two: Self-hosted bitcoin exchange Step Three: Profit ---------------------------------------------------------------------- blackstar2043 · 2023-11-28 22:04 If anonymity is your concern, then consider Monero (XMR) instead of BTC. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Still-Snow-3743 · 2023-11-29 03:17 Bitcoin is not a thing you host. The question is a bit like asking how you can change your car oil using self hosting, it's two concepts that don't relate to each other. If you have a Bitcoin wallet you can receive money at that wallet and where the wallet program is executed, or if it is even executed at all*, has no application to a self hosted server. *(paper wallets don't need to exist on a computer until you want to spend the balance stored on them) There isn't really a legal way to buy bitcoins without sharing your identity, at least in the United States and most 5 eyes country's. So either you use an exchange like coin base like everyone else, or you're on your own to figure out how you intend to break the law and get away with it. In either case there isn't much appropriate discussion to be had on the topic in this subreddit. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cr1tic · 2023-11-29 06:57 If you just want to donate to a private tracker and limit the paper trail, see if they accept XMR (Monero). If they do, buy off an exchange, send to your XMR wallet and then pay with that. Monero is designed to be untraceable so only the person who initiates the transaction has the key to decrypt the details for it... meaning people can't snoop on your transactions. https://www.getmonero.org/get-started/what-is-monero/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-29 13:34 I think they don't :( ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-29 13:38 Thanks for taking the time to explain. I don't feel like I'm breaking the law to anonymously buying 10 usd of bitcoin and donate it to a website. What I understand so far is that I could setup an exchange locally like Bisq and then buy bitcoin there from people and get those sent to my wallet somewhere not self hosted. On that same site I would have to send the money to the site I want. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Still-Snow-3743 · 2023-11-29 14:10 I think what you are looking for is running a bitcoin wallet on your local computer, I'd recommend Electrum for this task. Electrum will generate your bitcoin wallet, which is a file which contains wallet addresses that you can give to people to send you bitcoins. The nature of cryptography makes it so the wallet addresses you generate are unique to you and not spendable by anybody else. You don't even need to be online to make wallet addresses. You just need to write down the wallet seed, which is about 20 random words, that electrum gives you on a piece of paper somewhere and keep it safe, this is the sole piece of information that will allow you to check your wallet balances and spend your money in the future. Then you download TOR, and configure electrum to connect to the bitcoin network via TOR. This will anonymize your connection to the internet for checking your wallet balances and spending your cryptocurrency. All of the above is legal to do. I'm not a lawyer so take the following with a grain of salt, but I believe sending and receiving bitcoin is also legal to do without involving your name online, it is the same as exchanging cash with someone. It's when you trade bitcoin for cash that it becomes an issue, anti money laundering laws require people who exchange bitcoins for cash to keep a record of the identities of people they exchange with. So if you buy bitcoin from someone from a traditional legal exchange, they have your name, and they have a record of which bitcoin address they sent that money to. The contents of the bitcoin blockchain are public knowledge so anyone can look up an address, see its balance, and see what addresses the wallet sent money to. So if you received money and spent it somewhere, a sufficiently sophisticated legal entity could probably attach all those transactions to your name, even if you were connecting to the internet using TOR to spend your received money. The one exception to all of this that I am aware of is Monero. Monero is an alternative cruptocurrency that uses "double blind trust" cryptography to conceil the monetary balances and spending destinations of wallets generated on its cryptocurrency blockchain. In theory this is effective, but if the big bad government found a way around Monero's implementation they certainly wouldn't make that public knowledge. So in all of this you have to ask yourself if what you are doing is above the law and if you're ok with the internet police being able to investigate what you are doing with your cryptocurrency if investigated, because it is more likely than not that if they were motivated they could figure it all out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-29 18:21 Thank you for taking the time to reply to all that information. It was very informative. My needs in terms of crypto are very limited, and I think at this point it would be too much overhead to sepf host 2 apps to get a payment through. BTW, I'm not trying to hide from the government that I'm supporting a website. I want to hide my personal identity from the site owners. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Still-Snow-3743 · 2023-11-29 20:00 With those requirements then you don't need to worry about any of this. You can just buy cryptocurrency at an exchange like coinbase, and have the exchange pay the website owner's bitcoin address directly. Coinbase won't know who you are sending too, and the website owners wont know who sent them the money either. It's only really state agencies that can corelate and deanonymize who sent who money on bitcoin. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- igmyeongui · 2023-11-29 20:37 Then it's fine by me! Thank you for confirming. I found a Canadian exchange that accepts Interac transfer, which is very easy to do and costs nothing. Their transfer fee is 1.5%, which, if I remember, is much lower than what I had with Binance before. The only way they had that I got to work was CC.