Topic: Receiving and Sending BTC Anonymously Wallet? (Read 169 times)

Exactly. But VPN are centralized and how about them keeping data log? Some people make use of SPV wallet in a way addresses are connected and linked to IP or VPN connection. Some VPN say they do not keep data log but we can not believe because they are centralized. Normally, people should only visit https sites but even with this, anonymity is never complete unless using Tor. I know you understand this but just saying. I only use paid VPN to access the sites that disable Tor connection, but this has not been an issue while using it on decentralized apps and sites.

You don't have to be fully anonymous to use Bitcoin. Your average housewife is certainly not the type for that. She posts pictures of the meals she cooks and how good her children are in school on her Instagram. When she chills on the sofa with her husband watching Netflix, you will know about that as well.

Very few people chose the route of total anonymity. But Bitcoin can work absolutely fine without it. Social media and Google services have much larger userbases than Bitcoin will ever have and it doesn't matter.   

Sure, but think about the price paid by the people who don't care about their privacy at all. The complete lack of security they get by using centralized exchanges, the risk of having their accounts frozen or coins seized at any time, the risk of having their documents leaked and their identity stolen, the risk of having crimes committed or money laundered in their name, the risk of being targeted for hacks/attacks/phishing/scams once their addresses and wallets are linked to them, etc. And all that is assuming that you are inexplicably fine with the government being able to monitor your every transaction and every purchase.

Yes, it is time consuming to protect your privacy, the price for not doing so is far higher.

I can only full on agree with o_e_l_e_o on this.  Bitcoin only gets more complicated the more private you want to be.  It is pretty intelligent of a coin, you are pseudonymous.  Whoever did this was definitely a genius.  You can be more private, if you want.  This makes Bitcoin's existence easier to be accepted than Monero's existence is and if people cared about being private, then Alexa, Google, Facebook, Smart TV's and all of that would have failed miserably.

The difficulty of being private with Bitcoin is not a problem for the regular person though.  Most just do not care.  But if you do decide to go the private way, it is less complicated to avoid having your transaction seen by Electrum nodes than it is to avoid having your transaction seen by authorities.  The more you want to hide, the harder it gets and the more risks there are to make mistakes.

After all, the Bitcoin users have been divided into two kinds of users.  Those who use Bitcoin without caring about privacy, and those who make efforts and pay big prices for being private.  Prices as in you can no longer make deposits on centralized exchanges, you have to pay a high fee for no KYC ATM's, you have to do risky face to face transactions, you have to use Bisq which is much slower than a CEX and requires security deposits, you have to pay a hefty overall fee for using Wasabi's Coin Join and the list goes on.  And for what is worse, after all of this you find out FBI is supervising your activities for using Tor, the person you exchanged Bitcoin for USD with was a Fed, the ATM you used sends pictures of your face to the authorities for AML procedures, Coin Join gets censored while Wasabi collaborates with the government and you get to be a suspect of crime for willing to deny all of the control.  They are everywhere, your life has been strongly intruded by them but nobody cares.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

It doesn't. The fact is that most people do not care about anonymity, otherwise everyone would just be using Monero. Bitcoin not being anonymous will not be a stumbling block to mass adoption. The vast majority of people in the world are quite happy to use services such as Facebook which spy on them, use browsers like Chrome which spy on them, even bugging their own homes with listening devices which record everything they say. The vast majority of people will therefore not care if their transaction can be spied on too.

If you do use a VPN, you should be using one which collects no personal information about you and allows you to create an account using an anonymous payment method such as cash or well mixed crypto.

Install HTTPS Everywhere or use a browser such as a Firefox which has an HTTPS-only mode.

They can read that if you use the old http. Nowadays, with https, that information is transferred encrypted.
Basically the can take a look at anything that goes unencrypted through their hands.

Here I am reading all this and I have an idea that this is incredibly difficult for the average housewife. It is possible to learn basic actions and use bitcoin, but it turns out that it will take a lot of effort to remain anonymous. Many will not want to, will not be able to master it, and the difficulties will push them away. Is it possible to speak in this case of mass adoption? I think it's still very, very early. To do this, the system must be made as simple as possible for use and anonymity.

Can often see recommendations to use VPN, but it was only you that I first saw a warning:
This is quite natural, because, like any intermediary, VPN can receive information about you, and few can resist the additional profit from the sale of this.

VPN providers can get any info that users enter in the browser? Including logins, passwords?

One of the loopholes that people forget when dealing with cryptocurrencies is the issue of searching for the transaction in the block explorer.
Block explorers are good but some of them log your IP address so even if you're doing privacy checks when you're creating a transaction, using a VPN, or even managing a full node, a search using the explorers might identify you.


Source ---> https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/09/21/leaked-slides-show-how-chainalysis-flags-crypto-suspects-for-cops/

Blockchain.com is also one of the suspicious explorers who might sell data (if they don't.)


Use Tor with privacy focus bitcoin block explorers (such as Blockchair) or verify your transaction yourself with your own block explorer.

This is a very long subject and your privacy with Bitcoin depends on SO many things I would need a darn book to tell you about it.  At the end of the day, it all depends on one thing: your level of paranoia.  The more paranoid you are, the more you have to do to avoid having your identity, balances, addresses, IP or whatever else exposed.

Typically, since not many care about running full nodes and using Tor to avoid ISP's sneaking up on their stuff, addresses get linked together or to a specific wallet.  By reusing addresses and not using Coin Control, it becomes easy to make links.  But it will not be known yet whether this wallet is an Electrum, a Ledger, a Trezor, a Bitcoin Core or whatever.

Now things change and get less private when you introduce Electrum, Ledger Live, Blockchain Wallet and any custodial wallets or a web wallet in the middle of all of this.  Electrum runs through servers, so long story short, load a seed into Electrum and one server will know which addresses belong to it since the balance requests come from a single IP.  Ledger Live is even worse.  You have Coin Control and new receiving addresses, but Ledger's servers will now know that you use a Ledger and link addresses, balances et cetera so by now your privacy is gone.  That is, unless you trust Ledger's servers.

Creating a new one-time use seed for privacy reasons is one thing I used to do, but having so many seeds becomes a headache at one point and to me it only makes sense if Electrum is running through Tor (I used to run it through Tails) on a Linux since Windows is known for spyware and this kind of crap, the coins I am moving through the one time Electrum seed have been anonymized by use of mixers, Lightning Network et cetera and the final destination will not be Ledger Live, Electrum or other non private wallets again.  Because if you move coins from an address linked to you to an unknown one only to move them back to an address linked to you, it is ultimately a waste of time.  Privacy wise it is as useful as withdrawing $500 cash from an ATM and then depositing them back into your account.

You have to understand it is not about transaction history or how many seeds you generate.  I have had seeds specifically generated to have privacy and even if there is a bulky history of transactions in only one of my seeds, none of the addresses are linked together.  It is all about your behavior.  If you use Coin Control properly, are running your wallet on a Full Node instead of servers and your coins are not coming from non anonymous sources like Bitcointalk campaign earnings, Binance withdrawals, Coinbase purchases et cetera then your privacy is significantly better than average.

But as I said at the beginning of my reply, it depends on the level of your paranoia.  To some of us, the satisfying level of privacy is using Ledger Live with Coin Control so the average Block Explorer user does not get to easily link addresses to a wallet.  But some of us only feel a satisfying level of privacy by running a Full Node in combination with Coin Control so that balances are verified rather than requested from servers too.

There are more paranoid ones who need to have their coins mixed too, because Chainalysis exists and in combination with information from ISP's and whatever other tools and data they use, history of your coins could be exposed.  But then there are even more paranoid ones who need a fully airgapped computer and only broadcast transactions through disposable sessions of Tor.  Then we get to extremes, where you have transactions broadcasted through radio, lack of trust in any kind of proprietary hardware or software due to backdoors and so on.

I suggest you start slow by running your own Bitcoin Full Node through Tor, practicing proper Coin Control use and using Tor Browser as deault whenever you have the possibility.  Tor, not VPN.  VPN's are not anonymous and most of them even sell your history and data.  Slowly work your way up to a higher level of privacy from there.  Try not to complicate things too much until you learn the basics very well.

Depends.  Say you received this $20 on your spare Ledger as you say.  I will not be able to link this transaction to your main Ledger unless the transaction comes FROM your main Ledger.  But if you used Ledger Live for all of this, then Ledger's servers know these addresses belong to you.  If you run a Full Node through Tor instead and the transaction is received in your empty spare Ledger, then neither me or Ledger's servers will be able to make links.  That is, unless the Secure Element does something malicious .. get it?  Depends on level of paranoia and who you do or do not trust.  The less trust there is, the more effort is needed and the higher your paranoia gets.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

If you have other addresses in your wallet the Electrum server will know that the addresses are linked.
If you don't hide your IP and connect to the same Electrum server, even if you have different wallets holding the funds, the Electrum server will know that the addresses are linked.
If you use ToR you will hide your IP, but, as you see, it may not be enough.

It's also public knowledge that chain analysis companies do own some of the Electrum servers (and we don't know which ones).


So if you don't want the addresses get linked together, even if you use different addresses for different goals, Electrum (and any other SPV wallet!) may not be for you (unless you learn how to get yourself a private Electrum server).

Example would be this.  Imagine a site or someone send you 20 dollars worth of btc to your spare nano ledger wallet and not your main one.  Or it could be a new electrum seed wallet which has no transaction history.  Then you send that full amount of 20 dollars worth of btc to someone else. 


Does that transaction still link to you or not?  The thing is if it's a wallet that has zero transactions, it wouldn't right?  But that is only if you TOR which I keep hearing about?  Again all I heard is Tor for privacy but do not have a clue about it.


But if you use your main nano ledger that generate receiving address or electrum that you used a while back, then it certainly does right?  The thing that is confusing is when you use a new receiving address each time, isn't that for privacy?  But it would still link to you other transactions that you done in your nano ledger history and electrum history?

I have a nano ledger where I store my coins.  I previously had used electrum to store my coins on the computer.



Now when I receive btc, I would use whatever is the receiving address that is shown on my nano ledger before I copy and paste it to the site that I am receiving btc from.  I don't believe I ever reused a receiving address more than once with the nano ledger s as I get a receiving address each time.  With electrum however, back then I use to repeat using the same receiving address many times not knowing it wasn't good for privacy.



Now let say I want to receive a tiny amount of btc but I want it to go to an anonymous wallet and not my main wallet which is the nano ledger s. The thing is if I get a new receiving address on my nano ledger and btc is sent to me... that address is still linked to my nano ledger correct?  Since the amount of btc is added to my total btc balance? What about electrum?  Now if you use another nano ledger or use the same nano ledger and create a new seed... or use electrum but create a new seed with no wallet history...that certainly would make a difference since it has no transaction history right?



Let say I receive 0.0005 btc to make it simple in the nano ledger or less than 20 dollars.



Then let say I sent 0.0005 btc minus the sending btc fee to someone thus less than 20 dollars cash.  I read there is a history in the blockchain of the transaction but does it ever link to the person?  Doesn't it link due to change addresses or is that only with electrum?  So if it is the same nano ledger seed you are using, then yes... if not... then no?  Because if someone receives btc from a site and trades it for 20 dollars with someone else... is that even anonymous or not?  Let say most important that site doesn't require KYC.  Now if you use another nano ledger or use the same nano ledger and create a new seed... or use electrum but create a new seed with no wallet history...that certainly would make a difference since it has no transaction history right?



The thing is isn't the issue with receiving and sending btc anonymously an issue still? I heard about vpn's but those are not even good enough right?  I always heard about TOR and mixers but don't have a clue about it.