Thank you so much!

I finally found the time to sit down to this during the weekend, and it turned out points 1-5 were super easly (thanks to your guide)

Now, I will try to do the "fun part" - point 6

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One more general question:

Suppose I somehow fail to properly verify the bticoin core file, and somehow manage to download a tainted version of bitcoin core.

IF I interact with bitcoin core only through my hardware wallet,

then

I understand that the worst that may happen is that I will be somehow "mislead" by the fake btc core, and if I send my coins they may end up in some other address than the one shown on btc core.

However, when interacting through a hardware wallet my coins are still safe as long as I don't move them. In other words, the malicous third party running the tainted btc core cannot access my coins, it can only mislead me, and cause me to send my coins to their address.

IF the above is correct, then I understand that the best precaution would be always sending small batch of btc first. Then open some third party trusted btc explorer (multiple at best) and verify without using btc core that the coins actually went to the adress they were suppose to go?

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So, with the "fun part" (use GPG to check the SHA256SUMS file), I got stuck here:



ThomasV's fingerprint is used when checking the Electrum file, but how do I get the fingerprint for BTC core?

I asked GROK for help

GROK told me to find a list of these keys in the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository under contrib/builder-keys/keys.txt
I managed to get to the contrib folder as instructed by GROK. But inside this folder there is no "builder-keys" folder as GROK claims

I am new to BTC, and am also rather not particularly tech-savvy. However I managed to understand (and test with some minimum amount of BTC) hardware wallets, seed phrases and all. Simply because I could always find online a “explain to me like I am 8 years old” guide to all that stuff.

Before buying any substantial amount of BTC I would like to increase my privacy. So I decided to run my own node. I use Windows.

Verifying the bitcoin core file is where I got completely stuck. Most of us (regular people) have never run CMD on Windows or done similar things! So for instance this guide here is obviously made by coders for quite tech-savvy people:
https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#windows-10

Take for instance this part:

That’s great but …HOW?

I found other guides online that even elaborate a bit on the verification part. But they always assume I know how to do a lot of stuff. I even tried asking GROK and Chat GPT for help regarding a specific step, but always got stuck somewhere.

Is there any step by step (meaning: click here, open this…)  guide to verify the downloaded bitcoin core file explained “like I am 8 years old”?