hedgeless_horseman’s E-Z Internet Guide To Safely Buying and Then Conveniently Losing Bitcoin in a Tragic Boating Accident

“We fear what we do not understand.”

You may have read my ZeroHedge article, hedgeless_horseman’s E-Z Internet Guide On How To Actually Buy Gold, and Not Just Talk About It, Bitchezzz!!!!  This past June, at the First ZeroHedge Symposium and Live Fight Club in Marfa, I learned some good information from Ken and Jonathon about disintermediation using crypto currencies during their excellent talk, “Rise of New Financial Ecosystems – How to Make it Work For You.”

Like other sympopsium attendees, after listening to the talk, I felt confident enough to return home and begin aquiring some firsthand experience with cryptocurrencies.  Now, just three months later, I bring to you, dear ZH readers, hedgeless_horseman’s E-Z Internet Guide To Safely Buying and Then Conveniently Losing Bitcoin in a Tragic Boating Accident.  

It’s so E-Z even an old goldbug can do it!

First, buy a Trezor Hardware Wallet.  Yes, they are probably most conveneintly available at Amazon, the go-fund-me site for Jeff Bezos’ political blog known as, The Washington Post.  If you would rather not be an enabler of Jeff’s propaganda, here is another site that appears to sell them in the USA:  https://cryptowalletsupply.com/  Please, let us all know in the comment section, below, if you have a better source.

Second, while you are waiting for the Trezor to arrive in the mail…it is a piece of hardware after all…open a Coinbase account on line at: https://www.coinbase.com/

Yes, I understand that Coinbase is a fucking bank, for all intents and purposes, and I am aware of at least a few of the risks of using their service, only some of which can be easily mitigated.  I will touch on some tactics in a moment, if you keep reading.  Please, remember that this is an E-Z Internet Guide, intended to help other neophytes like me gain firsthand experience with cryptocurrencies.  Coinbase does, in fact, make it easy to buy Bitcoin, at least relative to the other online options currently available.   There are, of course, costs in addition to risks.  Expect Coinbase to charge you a fee of about $19.18 to purchase $480.82 of BTC using a Visa Debit Card.  Once again, please, let us all know in the comment section, if you have a safer, better, and/or cheaper solution.

When setting up a Coinbase account, I discovered that I could buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, or LiteCoin using either a wire transfer, checking account, or bank card.  If I upload a photo ID, to authenticate my bank account, then I am, “rewarded,” with higher weekly purchase limits.  I understand that there are probably much more secretive ways of buying Bitcoin, but why?  I learned in Marfa that, unlike gold coins, Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous, and are rather quite the opposite.  It seems to me that for BTC purchases, secure is far more important than secret.  If you disagree, then you can probably find someone on Craig’s List that will sell you some BTC for cash at midnight behind the Bowling Alley.

This is not an article about WHY you should buy bitcoin.  The main goal of this article is to spur some discussion about the practical aspects of HOW you can buy Bitcoin, safely, and then lose it in a convenient fashion.  I also hope to communicate my personal experience that the process is not insurmountable, but neither is it very convenient.  It may, however, be relatively safe, thanks mostly to the cool little gadget known as a Trezor.

John McAfee, the computer security expert that vowed to eat his own dick on live television if BTC does not rise to $500,000 inside of three years, recommends Trezor.

Talk about having some skin in the game.

August 25, 2017

Excerpt from an interview with John McAfee

Interviewer: “Is there any way to secure your bitcoins once you have earned them?”

“Absolutely! I think mine are secure. But the only way to do it is offline. You can buy devices, my favorite one is Trezor and the reason is, is because your seed keys. When you first create a wallet it gives you a thing called seed keys. Its a list of words, random words. Car, shoelace, dog, cow, whatever. These are your seed keys. Randomly generated to the point that theres no way anybody could ever guess them in the right order.

… Whats nice about the Trezor device, is it has a tiny little screen that shows you the seed keys on this screen not your smart phone, not your laptop, not your desktop. But on that device. So no hacker can access them. Then once you put your bitcoin into the wallet, unplug it, bury it in the back yard, hide it under your mattress, whatever you want to do with it like it was real cash.

But to keep the wallet on any intelligent device (referring to online wallets) whether its your laptop, desktop or any mobile device is insane, it will get stolen.”

Once your Trezor arrives, make sure that the Trezor’s secure packaging is intact, then follow the instructions that come with it.  They will walk you through setting up a Trezor Wallet on the internet, and your Trezor hardware device.

After you have completed these instructions, and hidden both paper copies of your list of seed key code words, read this article about how and why to, “Hide Your TREZOR Wallets with Multiple Passphrases.”  Hidden Trezor wallets are the technological equivalent of losing your gold in a boating accident.  Good luck proving I didn’t.

In the age when security services might detain you until you decrypt your hard drive, or border guards might threaten to deny you entry until you reveal your phone’s PIN, it is only a matter of time before the state authorities discover what Bitcoin hardware wallets are (maybe they did already). When they do, what can stop them from forcing you to unlock and reveal your wallet?

This is not only limited to governments though, look at the classic $5 wrench example…

With this or a similar set up you are now able to produce a decoy wallet under duress or during government controls. Since there is no way to prove that there is any wallet beyond the ones that you have admitted to, the “attacker” will have to be satisfied with the revealed ones.

Also, for national security purposes, you have unlocked and “decrypted” your device and therefore you have fully complied with the security control.

Pro Tip

When crossing borders (or even during daily usage), you can always turn Passphrase Encryption off and on repeatedly. If you turn it off, the passphrase-protected wallets will not be deleted, but the passphrase input form will disappear from the GUI. This creates an illusion that passphrases were never used in the first place?—?one cannot accuse you of having hidden wallets. When needed, turn the feature back on and use your passphrases as usual.

https://blog.trezor.io/hide-your-trezor-wallets-with-multiple-passphrase…

Next, buy some Bitcoin in your Coinbase account, then send it to your Trazor wallet.  You can generate a new receive address for your Trazor each time, to at least try to fuck with the crypto-transaction tracking software being used by the revenuers.

Last, but not least, consider the benefits of dollar cost averaging, which is buying the same dollar amount of BTC every week, month, or quarter, to lower your average purchase price in a rising market, and therefore increase your rate of return.  I described this proven strategy in the article about buying gold coins, and it works the same for BTC.

If you do happen to lose your Trezor in a boating accident, you can always recover your Bitcoin by using your list of seed code words.  No SCUBA gear required!

Peace, prosperity, love, and liberty!

h_h