Bitcoin Forum

continuation of the title -> on the internet/and in the crypto space?

Hey there everyone, I'm looking to achieve the peak security and privacy while I deal and transact with cryptocurrencies and I gotta say that my line of work I'm looking at isn't the most ethical, and I'm looking to ensure my safety. Is there any case where using my own, actual computer is *safe*? Say if I transact on a website, even if I use untraceable crypto, a VPN, and anonymized data, if it leads to that, the police can still obtain data about me through my VPN, correct?

I contacted and read about ExpressVPN and it is said to be one of the most encrypted and safe, they don't ever keep your data, but I am not sure if that is true. I personally own a 2nd hand ExpressVPN subscription because that way I have in no way bought it personally.

Is there a way to reach another level of safety, or are my choices limited?

You can never be truly anonymous, since there is no level of absolute anonymity online. The only way to remain truly anonymous is to avoid the Internet altogether.  :D

While not entirely foolproof, you may want to consider using the Tor browser for an extra level of security. Tor is a network of tunnels that can route web requests and downloads. It's not a VPN, although it might be even more effective in masking your identity.

Not 100%, no.

The closest we have to untraceable crypto at the moment is Monero.

VPNs do not provide anonymity. All your data goes through the VPN server and can therefore link your real IP address to your destination address, as well as monitor all your traffic.

It's true until it isn't, and you have no way to verify what they claim.

Buy a laptop anonymously with cash. Rip out the hard drive. Boot to a live OS designed for privacy from a USB drive such as Tails. Connect to the internet via a connection that is in no way linked to you or could be used to find out who you are (so not a public hotspot where there are CCTV cameras). Do everything over Tor. Do whatever you need to do, then destroy the computer. Still not 100% safe though. And you also need to be aware of all the tracks you will be leaving on the blockchain, viewable to anybody.

There is not such thing as “most encrypted”. It either uses unbreakable encryption or not. If you want anonymity prefer Tor. It's much more trustworthy than the VPNs which will inform the police at the first opportunity.

VPNs do not provide any anonymity at all; the provider knows your IP and that's enough to trace you. They offer a supposed meter of privacy.

It depends on what things you've done and what info you've given. If I were you I'd do what o_e_l_e_o suggests just in case.

I would do what o_e_l_e_o suggested. If there's a business in their or a free wifi then you should connect to it as it can't link to yourself and when you do crypto transactions then you can use mixer to help masked your transaction. I wouldn't say that you can be invisible to the Internet. I would say that there could be part that can be covered and some can be tracked but not all of it.

o_e_l_e_o actually suggested not using a a public WiFi which would actually reduce your privacy and leave multiple tracks that can be traced or even compromise your security, such as how using a VPN could expose your IP address and other information to their server.

I would add that when privacy features are suggested on the forum, it's usually because there are ethical reasons why an individual would not want all their information to be publicly available, I'm a bit skeptical if you have unethical ones.

It may be completely impossible to hide your tracks on the internet because apart from all the instructions, carelessness may set it at times. However instead of hiding your tracks on the internet, you can strive to create a pseudo identity to help hide your real identity and it will has to start from beginning from getting a device maybe through someone and getting burner numbers and mails.

That's not what I said.

You book in to a hotel and do something illegal over their WiFi. They have a record of your name and booking details, so you are now one of a very small number of individuals who can be linked to that criminal activity. You walk in to a coffee shop and do something illegal over their WiFi. You bought a coffee using your credit card and your face is on their CCTV cameras, so again, you are a suspect (not to mention shoulder surfing). You have no idea how secure or otherwise their WiFi is. Are they monitoring all your traffic? Are you leaking data? Is someone else in the vicinity trying to hack in to your device?

Ideally, I would buy a burner phone with a burner SIM anonymously with cash. If you need to top up the SIM, again, do so anonymously with cash or with anonymous bitcoin or monero. Tether your laptop or other device through that connection, and destroy the phone and SIM when you are done. You'll want to do all this in a location distant from your home, obviously.

I once read one source about the advantages and disadvantages of online activity, hidden history, especially about anonymous identity.

Maybe, at a glance @decodex already explained for you about VPN vs. Tor.

However, I never use any of my online activities with a VPN or Tor, I have a comparison source between the two, have a look below:

Using Tor vs. VPN for Anonymous Browsing (https://clario.co/blog/tor-vs-vpn-comparison/)

Remember, I'm not telling you to use a VPN or Tor, I'm just showing you as a comparison, for sure everything you do online, of course you understand it better.

All of the above who unsubscribed seem to have become assistants to a young hacker or fraudster.
It is possible to remain anonymous on the Internet, but it looks like it needs knowledge, and the OP does not have it. But at the same time, he is going to do something not very good and asks for help from those people whom it will be possible to deceive in the future.
OP, although the forum does not prohibit cheating, but since your request clearly states that you require privacy for not-so-good activities, you just need to change the forum to get all the knowledge of how to hide on the net. Probably the darknet is too difficult for you, but the carding forums will teach you for a certain amount how not to fall for the police.  ;D

Doing something illegal doesn't mean he is trying to scam or defraud anyone. There are plenty of things which most people would agree are completely acceptable and yet highly illegal in various countries and jurisdictions, such as whistleblowing, standing up for LGBT rights, offering abortion services or healthcare to women, assisted suicide, assisting illegal immigrants, fighting against dictators or oppression, and so on. Even feeding the homeless is illegal is some places.

Just because OP wants to protect his privacy doesn't mean he is going to deceive, steal, scam, etc.

If you really become anonymous, you need to learn to be a hacker because that is not possible as a regular user who uses the internet all day long. You will leave some cache or cookies from any website you visit or the online store. Using VPN does not make you fully anonymous, but it could help you hide your real IP.

As long as you can be careful when you connect internet, I think you can feel safe and not too worried. I think you do not have to feel too stressed thinking about anonymity or not because you can prevent the bad thing that can happen to you.

Well, in truth, I don't give a damn what he's up to and what he wants to hide from.
I emphasized the fact that this forum, and especially the section for beginners, will not be able to provide him and teach him that confidentiality and anonymity that he would like to think about. All advice without proper tuning of experience and knowledge rolls into a pit.
And there are places on the Internet where confidentiality is not dealt with childishly, but it is taught at all levels. Which, in principle, I advised him.
Nothing personal.

Yes you can completely hide your tracks on the internet by moving away from cities, than you stop using internet, smartphones, computers and all modern technology, and than you start to live off the grid in some forest without any signal.
In reality, it's almost impossible to completely hide anything on internet, even if you are very careful and even if you use all the tools VPN and Tor correctly.
Most you can achieve with this tools is to reduce your online fingerprint and browsing history.

There's no need to become a hacker if you could just follow most of the advices above especially the suggestions that @o_e_l_e_o gave. And being anonymous just because you want to protect your privacy doesn't mean you are a bad guy. Well, whatever they want to do it's just the same guidelines that also benefit with the bad guy and either way there's no right or wrong on doing this. Although, you may look suspicious if someone is watching you.

cacclordx: you can hide completely online, but it implies a lot of work, not only installing a safer OS (there are a number of Linux distros aimed at that), using TOR, etc., but moving around and using public networks without CCTV, working off a pendrive, etc.
There was a thread on the Crunchbang forum, called "The Paranoid Guide to Security", or something to that effect, that had a ton of information. It's bound to be outdated, but should give you a really good starting point.
Or, of course, a much easier way would be just looking at a more ethical way of life...

Excuse me?

Does that imply that he's not having one right now due to his need for privacy? Does that imply that privacy is indissolubly connected with unethical attitude? Or that there's no even one law that goes against ethics? Clarify your outlook, cause you're in a forum that respects human rights and the like to the bone.

BlackHatCoiner: that doesn't imply anything, other than what I typed.
This does, though:


My outlook is very simple: I provide options, to the best of my knowledge. If the OP is stating his chosen (or about to be chosen) line of work is "not the most ethical", one option (being that he's concerned about his safety) would be to switch to another one. Not once did I say or imply he should do one thing or the other.

I'm sorry if I looked rude, I re-read my post. You're right about the statement, I hadn't noticed it, I had just given it a glimpse.

By outlook, I meant the general attitude to life. What's ethical and what's not is subjective. For instance, one may say that encryption shouldn't be an option without the government's approval. Or that our civil liberties should be inordinately curbed in the name of counter-terrorism.

My point is that you don't have to hide something that's unethical to require privacy. And in my opinion, even if you do, they can't seriously sacrifice every innocent person's privacy with the alibi to catch you.

Don't worry about it, you didn't. You did look somehow offended, though, which puzzled me for a moment.


Oh, I see.
Well, you're talking to a guy that survived a couple of years by pirating software, while I was in Miami, so you won't get any lectures from me. ;D
My position is I don't hurt people, and I don't allow people to hurt me. But I'm, above all, a practical man. If the risk is unacceptably high on something I do, I stop doing it. When I was pirating software, I started on a roommate's advice who was doing the same. Contrarily to me (and despite my efforts to make him be more careful), he was very flamboyant in his advertising, offering (among other things) "free shipping anywhere in the US" (which is considered contraband, and it's another federal offense). To make the story short, one day somebody knocked at the door. It was the cops, they were looking for him.
That's the day I stopped.

So, I'm an avid user of The Pirate Bay and YTS. I couldn't care less if Bill Gates has to wait one more day (or year, doesn't matter) to add an extra million to his bank account. But if the cashier at a supermarket makes a mistake and gives me more money than they should, I give it back.

I've had a quick read through that thread, which I found here: https://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24722. It does offer lots of good security advice, but not much in the way of privacy advice. However, there is unfortunately some pretty bad advice mixed in there too, such as saying that you should let your browser run Java and Flash, as well as suggesting a bunch of unnecessary browser add-ons, which only serve to make your browser fingerprint unique and therefore make your privacy much worse. The specific criticisms of Tor are not good reasons not to user Tor (it's slow, your ISP will know you are using Tor (this is easily prevented) and your Tor exit node can see your traffic (https keep most data encrypted)), and recommending a VPN as better than Tor when it comes to privacy is just plain wrong. He even suggests that a VPN allows you to use the internet "anonymously", which it absolutely does not.

o_e_l_e_o: well, in the best of cases, I play it by ear when it comes to security. But keep in mind that forum was closed about 5 years ago, so  the information on that thread is bound to be outdated. Just thought it'd be a good starting point...

In that case, may I also suggest the following site, which is constantly being updated and which anyone can suggest improvements for via GitHub: https://privacyguides.org/
It gives great information, which it will help you to tailor to your individual circumstances by considering and building a threat model.

If you need to find a privacy respecting replacement for a particular piece of software, then I would suggest this site: https://prism-break.org/

Note that these are both focused on privacy, not security. The two are complementary, but definitely not synonymous. And yet, even if you do everything these sites recommend, you will still not achieve 100% anonymity as OP is looking for.

Ooohhh, DEFINITELY! 8)
Thank you o_e_l_e_o. I have bookmarked them already!

Recently, I read an article about the benefits and drawbacks of online activity, hidden history, and especially anonymous identity.



However, I used a VPN for any of my online activities, not Tor. See below for a comparison of the two:



<a href="https://splvpn.com/tor-vpn-which-is-better/">Tor Vs VPN: What They Do And Which Is Better?</a>



Remember, I'm not telling you to use a VPN or Tor; I'm just showing you as a comparison, and of course, you understand everything you do online better.

There a few good resources to try to have some privacy on the internet.
However it is very challenge to achieve a decent amount of privacy online, as we need to give out our personal data for basically anything.

The best website where you can get the basic information is
https://www.privacytools.io/

If you want a deeper understanding about how to completely hide your tracks, this is a must read from Jameson Loop:
https://blog.lopp.net/modest-privacy-protection-proposal/ (A Modest Privacy Protection Proposal)

The main problem here is that it is very expensive. It includes even money used to rent mailboxes and stuff like that to receive itens you buy online.


I few time ago a posted this, which i tried to make a summary of the most improtant tools (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3210982)

A comparison between a VPN and Tor, written by a free VPN provider, is never going to be unbiased. Skipping over why free VPNs are a terrible idea, the privacy policy of that particular one says that they collect your name and other person information and use that information to send you ads and other marketing. That's a huge red flag and you should never use this provider.

As I've linked to just a couple of posts above, the actual site you want to be using is: https://www.privacyguides.org/. You can read why privacytools was abandoned here: https://www.privacyguides.org/blog/2021/09/14/welcome-to-privacy-guides

is tor only good enough?  So any free vpn is no good?

Nothing is perfect 100%.

You can not achieve 100% privacy, anonymity with the Internet, Tor connections, crypto transactions and mixers. What we do believe is perfect nowadays will become outdated and compromised (with its weakness) in future.

It is like hackers find security holes, bugs and exploit it. There are always black holes, bugs, weakness in any tool we are using.

Tor is the best for now and you can use it on mobile too.

• Download Tor: https://www.torproject.org/download/
• Tor for Android: https://www.torproject.org/download/#android
• Read guides on how to use Tor properly and set your security level

To be honest based on my opinion its kinda hard since gov like NSA on Edward Snowden movie will know everything about you. The legal company like google collect data about you if you are using cheap android like me the phone company is collect your data too. Browsing through VPN and tor broswer encrypted you to your server but still the isp still know about you.

And i dont know VPN provider says "no log" but if the police come might says about you too.

The company like wasabi chipmixer and tornado cash want to achieve untracked balance and transaction what you did and this most crypto want to achive privacy

If you understand how the internet works, then you would know that you can never be completely and totally anonymous. The internet is about sharing, and there way you can have a connection without sharing and there is no way you can get information without others sharing it.

So, in practical terms, it is impossible to completely clear your tracks,.no matter what.

Well, maybe I could be wrong. But I would love to be corrected.

Wasabi spies on their users. If you are interested in privacy, you should absolutely not use Wasabi.