Topic: More reason you should protect your privacy and anonymity as a Bitcoin holder. (Read 313 times)

We're pass and done on that era, we don't need to prove or debate anymore with those people that are talking nonsense about Bitcoin. What matters now is the importance of our safety and we just have to let them win over an argument but we know who's actually the winner on the discussion in terms of proving what Bitcoin can do and how profitable it is. We only live once and we don't need to pressure ourselves into winning an argument and just choose to live silently and peacefully enjoying in actuality our profits made through holding BTC.

Stories like this have evolved overtime in the crypto space and as more people keep suffering from exposing their privacy to the public, some people don’t still learn and they keep flaunting their source of wealth in the internet for people.

Even if today I become a professional trader, opening a YouTube page to teach others thereby exposing my real identity will pose a real danger to me. I know there will be other ways to teach people without exposing your real identity online, but I’m not even thinking of becoming a trader that teaches people about trading online.

Those that fall victims of this are mostly informed about the dangers that comes with exposing their privacy’s online but their lack of concern and naive attitude will still make them to otherwise and they later regret their actions for that. It is very important to keep your lifestyle very private as it will safe you from being vulnerable to attackers in the public.

This is why I don't feel the need to refute people who say Bitcoin is a scam or other nonsense. Showing that you are interested in Bitcoin is tantamount to waving red flags to make people speculate about your funds, imagining a lot of money up for grabs. It's very frustrating to hear something like this when you know it's not true, but you have to choose one of two things: either you teach someone about crypto and leave a mark on yourself, or you pretend to be a cat lover and completely divert people's attention from your favorite preferences.

That's why you use Mulvad or ProtonVPN.

In fact I am surprised that VPNs don't advertise here more often. This seems like the perfect place to get clients.

I actually thought that we as Bitcoin holders should be telling people about it to increase the awareness and adoption but this topic is saying that we should protect our privacy and anonymity. Thank you for this important information, this is the reason why I joined this forum so that I can add to the small knowledge that I have about Bitcoin.  I can see the reason why it is important to protect our Bitcoin privacy so that criminals will not target to steal our wallet seed phrase, it is also good to protect our privacy because Bitcoin is decentralized and there is no personal identification. I believe that it is the reason why this forum is anonymous so that we will not know one another.

The reason the government wants control is so that they can own and country everybody. The government has its hands all over the banking system, but it's still used for money laundering and funding other criminal activities like terrorism, drug trafficking, and human trafficking.

Most of the things that have been said about crypto by the government is not entirely true. They always make it sound worse than it actually is.
Trust me, the government doesn't need to control Bitcoin before that can monitor criminals. They have the resources to follow these guys in any way, except the person is not under their radar.

Which is also a major problem as many people tend not to know this, Satoshi has already pave way for the financial slavery to end and still yet the government are fighting this by every means and that's way the implementation of KYC has been put on but the choice is still yours as you have made this clear because you can still choose to save or keep your coins where it's actually safe for you be it custodial or non custodial wallet and also there are decentralized exchange and centralized exchange to make sell of your coins so everything reside with your opinion.

Those holding bitcoins must keep their privacy and identity hidden or else any serious danger may occur at any time. The risk may be even greater for bitcoin holders who typically hold their bitcoins on mobile devices. Because if they fall into the target of robbers or robbers while traveling then surely that Bitcoin is bad for them.The situation can lead to the fact that the hijackers will target him for those bitcoins and kidnap him and demand bitcoins as ransom. Therefore, all bitcoin holders should hide their identity and all documents from online and hold their bitcoins in a safe and secure place.

The irony of the privacy matter is that so many people have refused to complete kyc in any exchange or any platform but yet their activities on social media have already taken their privacy away. You can see someone who refused to complete kyc in any online platform, yet this person has a social media account where they display their picture and also link the data in their account to their personal life. Anyone who wishes to live a private life should do that to the later and there should not be any kind of compromise.

The data in the hand of the government is not the major problem because the government will at most use it for taxation or when there are fraudulent activities. But the data in the hands of criminals or hackers is very detrimental because they can use it against you at anytime.

That's a very sad story and we hear such stories every once in while. I believe that privacy is highly needed for crypto-investors because if someone from your own home town learns about your holdings then they can do so many wrong things with you. But, the mining can't be done in privacy and if they target miners then how should they protect their privacy? That's something we all have to understand and we all should share our ideas so in future miners may also be able to protect their identity.

It's not really hard to gain information about miners especially government knows a lot about them because they have to work according to the system's rules. I don't think that they can do much to increase their privacy, but at least they should be careful in online world as sharing details about their profits and earnings on social media or other online platforms can cause more damage to them.

We become talkative in real life when we meet someone who's in the same interest as us. But take it as something that you are interested about but don't reveal that you're already into it. Always talk as if you're a newbie in real life so that you'll get to know on who's actually in and who are just trying to know people that are in. I know for a fact that there are people that just distinguishing people who are into the scene so that they will have an idea who are the people that they can attack just in case they have ill intentions to us. Ensure that yourself is always on the safer side and don't get overwhelmed when the talk is all about profits that you've made.

The stories should serve a good reason why people especially crypto traders ought to be more cautious about the things they do, the places they go to and the things they say and people whom they disclose their financial dealings with, you can't be attacked as a rich or wealthy person if you don't give people a reason to do so and for the crypto enthusiasts who go robbed or killed and their funds taken, they are to be blamed because they are the reason behind their downfall, you don't discuss your privacy with people and expect some of them who don't have what you have not to think evil since they know they can easily rob you and take all that belongs to you. For the robbery and attacks to stop people needs to be mindful of the things they do or say in public, you can live a free life if you keep things on the low.

If we call that silly mistakes, what are we going to call people that keep coins on the exchange? I mean why are you going to keep all your coins on another exchange? Aside from the KYC complications, people has normalised centralized exchanges where to keep their coins. Maybe they see it as a conventional banks they use daily but they don't even know that the purpose of bitcoin is to minimize or even eradicate that from people but what do you expect? Almost everyone now are after where to profits and not to look on why the things they are buying and selling even exited.

What people don't know makes them doubt and it will be impossible to track or follow you. It's only when you leave traces on the internet it become easy for people to know. Why will you live your coins on centralized exchanges when you are not even a trader? Why?. I just think that no matter what you say, people will do what gives them comfort and that's centralized exchanges.

   Protecting  your privacy is what every Bitcoin holder should  do  . Privacy has to do with keeping  of transactions and your confidential that is your trusted secrets while anonymity is the concealing of your identity.

   Anonymity makes Bitcoin to be able to become strong against the system and state level attacks. It also helps in preventing scams and frauds ,identity theft, price control and limitations
   Privacy in Bitcoin is always noticed as an unidentified payment network and is one of the most transparent network,privacy is important for every cryptocurency users because when all transactions are seen on public blockchain your  monetary transactions will be an open book.

   Privacy and anonymity are very essential for any open financial system.

For a reasonable person, you don't need to be told before knowing the right thing to do, one of the reasons why cryptocurrency is a solution giver to our financial economy is the privacy, then why wouldn't we take every measure we need to take and ensure we have the privacy needed to use this digital network, if we are allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to any third party then we are making no difference to where we have started from in using fiat, privacy begins with what we do, where we do them and how, know the kind of wallet to use and secure your sensitive informations from the public.

It is good and important for Bitcoin holders to keep their privacy from the public eyes and don't reveal the worth of Bitcoin that they hold. If their wallet is compromised then a scammer can steal every Bitcoin in it and there will be no trace to recover the stolen Bitcoin. Like the story of the miner in Russia, if criminals know that you have plenty Bitcoin they can rob or kidnap you, all they need is your seed phrase and they will move all your Bitcoin to another wallet. Anonymity is important in Bitcoin because it is decentralized.

Every cryptocurrency person know quite well that privacy is the most important in cryptocurrency because if we try to make our private key to be public we might weak up the next day and whatever we have in our address get disappeared with a minute, that is why when anything concerning privacy ring to me I seems it like something that have to do with precautions and if we lost our coin because of making our private key to public its because of our carelessness that makes it to happen that way.

The government has been storing your personal data since you were born - that's a fact. On the one hand – I don't know why we are obliged to hide anything from the government, especially financial matters. Financial privacy must be protected from anyone who might pose a risk to its owner - but the government probably has a right to know what we own, unless we want to hide from taxes.

Taxes are a source of state revenue that is useful for the country and its people. Bitcoin should not be used so that users can hide from having to pay taxes - this is an abuse that must be avoided. Protect financial privacy is important – especially to protect you from any dangers lurking in your assets.

You're not exposed to the public except you choose to do so, cryptocurrency is what has given us the choice to make between what we want and what other things we feels we don't want to see happen to our financial economy, just as you could discover that some people value their privacy and some don't mind exposing themselves to the public, you have the choice of choosing between a custodial or non custodial means of storing your asset, you also decided which and what to use our invest on, our privacy isn't with anyone, rather in our hands if we are aware of that.

Its hard to stay anonymous when your VPN service is even selling data to the governments. Apart from that, when we share some common interests like for all of us its Bitcoin, we are already aware of our likes and dislikes and may fall under a certain group of people. If theres a big Bitcoin event in our city, we will surely love to connect with each other instead of keeping anonymity. Theres advantage and disadvantage in both.

I'm not a miner, but I suspect this activity requires a lot of electricity. So many. Further, how can a person engaged in mining maintain confidentiality while simultaneously using large amounts of electricity? In my country, this is very clearly visible; if there is an oversupply, the question of where and why there is so much will arise, and there will also be a simple check that will show all the expenses.
I don’t know what happened to that guy; perhaps he was very talkative, but even if he tried to maintain confidentiality, he, as a miner in Russia, would not succeed. I regularly see in the news that one or another mining farm has been discovered that uses electricity from someone else’s enterprise.
Therefore, talking about anonymity or confidentiality is appropriate when you first see the Internet and have not yet written anything there.
But yes, you can try to be anonymous. But this requires a lot of experience and knowledge. I’m not sure that many people here, having social networks, fully understand how “confidential” they are.

i remember a case where a bitcoin holder from china was murdered in my area while he was on holiday with his girlfriend. the killer actually just wanted to ask for his private key and didn't intend to kill him, but because he resisted, he ended up being killed and his girlfriend fell into a coma.

from this we can learn the lesson that it is important to remain anonymous and humble when owning bitcoin because we don't know who is targeting us when we tell how many assets we hold or when we flex for being a bitcoin investor to other people.

BIP39 Passphrases designed to reduce risk in the event you are exposed to a physical threat, you can give them your wallet seed or HW pin code. They will enter it and find your balance, but you will leave a small amount as a balance. Once they are gone and you know you are safe, you can enter your wallet seed + passphrase here and you can access all your funds safely.

Therefore, instead of losing all your money or not giving them your wallet seed, you can make them believe that all you have is $100 or a little more while your entire balance is hidden by passphrase.

I have always wanted it live a simple life in which nobody will know how much I am worth. This is why I am fascinated by Bitcoin because the currency gives me such privilege. All I need to do is to avoid centralised platforms and my privacy will be intact. Using fiat for daily transactions is normal but keeping your investment in fiat or these centralised exchanges is dangerous very dangerous. Some criminals have spies and informants who work in most of these centralized platforms and give out individual information to criminals. These corrupt bank or exchange staff know how much you are worth, so they can arrange to kidnap or rob these individuals.

Let's say someone bought ASICs or other mining rigs, do you think what the person will doing with that stuff?

Well he could be a reseller, but since it's related to mining, other people would think if he's someone who rich and have a lot coins. That's why it's risky to buy a stuff related to cryptocurrency, you need to find a way to not share your information too much.

You need to distinguish between the place where you live and the place of your mining farm that protected by few security.

Let's say you have a wallet without passphrase that contain 0.005 BTC (dummy wallet).

You can create a new wallet by using additional passphrase from your dummy wallet, this is your main wallet where you hold most of your coins.

In case you get kidnapped, just show the dummy wallet seed phrase, they might think it's all the coins you have.

If you can invest in cryptocurrency, trade it at home, or if you can hide what you do when you are going to public places with public Wifi, Internet connection, you already do a good prevention for your privacy and safety.

I don't get your idea here.

"Hide money", what's it?

If I have a cryptocurrency wallet, non custodial, I will store it at home but if I have to use a hot wallet, go around, I will only store small money in my hot wallet and use password to encrypt it.

I also will try to open and log in that wallet as much as possible when I am at public locations. It is a preventive hide step because if they don't know I have a wallet in the phone, laptop, they will less pay attention on me.

[GUIDE] How to Create a Strong/Secure Password
Modest privacy protection proposal

How can privacy be protected in this case? From what I understood, he is a miner, that is, someone who runs a Bitcoin mining farm. This farm may be large (due to the ransom amount) and it is difficult or impossible to hide it. This crime may not be related to cryptocurrencies, and it was not mentioned they demanded the ransom in Bitcoin or Monero.

What I'm trying to say is that privacy is important and you should be careful that the public does not know your crypto assets and using passphrase may be useful in avoiding situations where you cannot hide your money.

The bad thing is that we see more and more steps in that direction, and we don't see steps back. If things continue like this, in the end it will make more sense for bitcoins to be held by a bank than by you in a HW, which may even prohibit them in the future, or force KYC to buy them. All very different from the idea for which it was created but it seems that we are heading towards it.

Well mixers are banned here probably soon it will be done to main action on these platforms. Its getting tougher to remain anonymous if we dont put that to work. I mean most people or into crypto trading are oblige to do KYC already especially on Binance and other major exchanges. Is there a known info or data that provides such anonymity tally or percrntage whose users arent yet dox completely?

Bitcoin physical attacks.

People must hide their identities as much as possible, for privacy, safety of their life and their coins. Unfortunately, in reality they do oppositely. They want to be recognized, want to be famous and they show their faces everywhere. By wanting to be known, they take risk which is not only for their bitcoins but also for their life and even family members's security.

Yes, this isn't new in crypto, we heard different sad stories in crypto that happened to our fellow crypto enthusiasts because they didn't care about their privacy.  But there's nothing we can do about this get learn from their mistakes.  We should value our Bitcoin like real money and I think, this kidnap and ransom not only happen on Bitcoin but is usually common in fiat.

So to avoid this, we should be cautious about sharing information that could be used to predict our actions, especially posting it on social media.
Most especially those habit of displaying expensive belongings in public or on social media.

Well, another situation where a person is in danger because of his/her identity, personal information is not hidden or doesn't have privacy. There are some people who really didn't care about their privacy until they become victim just like the one you shared. Even though I don't have lots of money but I still care for my privacy as we don't know that there's someone or a group of people who are planning to do something bad and then ask for money when it will happen. We don't know when it will/might happen but the only thing we can so is to do our best to prevent it from happening.

The thing you need to understand here is that bitcoin transactions are stored or recorded publicly on the blockchain as long as it’s an on-chain transaction. So now let’s say you have a CEX which is KYCed and also a DEX where you keep your coins which is entirely bad you don’t keep coins on exchanges but wallets. When you move your coins from either the KYCed centralized exchange to your Decentralized , or even the other way round, with the CEX having your identities it is easier to just connect every transaction from and into that CEX address to you because the transaction is public. This is one of the reasons why even re-use of an address is not advisable because it will just weaken by our privacy.

It seems am lost here. when talking about government not having right to a our fund keep me confuse/wondering what are you really trying to say about government and monetary control or kyc, I need a clarity on what you really mean.

Because as far as I know kyc doesn't mean they have total access to your fund. Rather only makes them control CEX and not DEX. which your total fund can be in decentralized exchange while you can decide to sell the amount you want to sell from sending from Dex to cex for exchange. So I see no total control about that. If I am wrong you correct me about that.

Then why don't you go back to using fiat and trusting your money with banks or centralized systems who makes profits of you. If you really care about how Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are been used to commit crimes which wasn't part of their creations purpose then you should reconsider and let the government have total control of your funds.

Government Doesn't deserve the right to any peny you worked hard for mate I want you to know that. You have full rights as a citizen to your earned money. And who cares if the governments funds are stolen? They are even worse than the criminals we talk about.

For long, criminals have deviced new ways to steal and reap people of their hard earned money and most time it's out of ignorance that gives them these chances.

I think you used the word control wrongly, do you think government having control will actually take away the crime’s conducted using it? No, the only control the government want is that which will enable them to manipulate the price and not to protect you from anything that they say. If it is about protection wouldn’t issue laundry involving would have been reduced by now?. Bitcoin doesn’t even gives total anonymity of transactions its transactions are public or let me say it’s a pseudonymous currency but the government wants more because they just wish to monitor your everyday transactions. If the government gets control of this currency then kiss bye some decentralized functions like it been a store of value. Everyone deserves privacy and freedom if they want it

In as much as we talk about cryptocurrencyBTC investment and the importance, there is also a need For government to have control also. A total anonymity of crypto transaction gives room for fraudulent activities like money laundering and becoming a room for scammers Hide out, and this is the more reason why cryptocurrency is a threat to government Because of the decentralized nature that can't be controlled. Government of any entity deserves the right to have access to any monitery system even if it's not %100 but at least %60 or %70. Despite important of crypto currency, I think it has a high risk and we should not neglect that fact. because if it is not regulated properly a good hacker can move the entire government reserved bitcoin and criple government bitcoin reserved.  

There are been many sad stories on the internet of crypto enthusiasts who got killed or rubbed of their assets because they stupidly compromised their privacy by their choice of lifestyle. The truth is, just as people keep making silly mistakes with their wallet security, so will naive users keep endangering themselves by flaunting their wealth online. We cannot actually control people's lifestyle but we can hope they get well informed and make better choices.

It's not new that Bitcoin, a decentralized system, offers users more privacy compared to other cryptocurrencies. Many people choose to invest in Bitcoin for this reason. Privacy is not just about keeping our identity from the public or government; there are other benefits. In a recent incident, a Russian miner was kidnapped and demanded a ransom of 15 million rubles ($166,000). A very large amount right?

Over the years, criminals have been targeting and holding more crypto holders, posing threats not only to individuals but also to large crypto firms. Many people lack awareness of how to protect their privacy online, merging their crypto and social lives. Some enthusiasts share their Bitcoin holdings publicly, putting themselves at even more risk. Privacy in Bitcoin and the crypto space is crucial to avoid attracting unwanted attention from the underworld(criminals).

While newcomers or those with small Bitcoin holdings may think they have nothing to hide, the increasing popularity of Bitcoin makes everyone a potential target. Sharing too much information can lead to danger, as seen in incidents like the Russian miner's kidnapping.
Maintaining privacy as a Bitcoin holder involves setting clear boundaries between your social life and online activities. This helps reduce the risk of attention from hackers and criminals.

Unfortunately, privacy has been compromised with the introduction of KYC requirements by major exchanges and other centralized systems working with Bitcoin.

Anonymity is no longer guaranteed, as our data is now in the hands of the government. Despite the government's right to inquire about personal financial matters, their overzealous actions towards Bitcoin holders and investors have raised concerns. To avoid unnecessary drama, staying anonymous and protecting your privacy is crucial within the Bitcoin community. Wise consideration of the reasons behind privacy and anonymity in Bitcoin is essential for every one, including the newbies who thinks they have nothing to loss.