Hi all,
I am a newbie and have some basic Bitcoin questions.
I have purchased Bitcoins using
Coinbase (ACH transfer from my bank account) and the bitcoins are now sitting in my Coinbase account. As I understand Coinbase, the bitcoins don't really belong to me at this point. They are kept in trust for me by Coinbase, much like cash in a bank.
I want to have both of the following:
- A personal wallet under my control which I don't care if it can be publicly traced to me.
- A personal wallet under my control which I want to remain anonymous for any number of perfectly good reasons. I don't engage in illegal conduct and don't have any fear of the police coming for me, but want this wallet to not be traceable to me for any reason.
I appreciate your feedback on how to get there from where I am right now with Coinbase. These are my preliminary thoughts for the anonymous wallet:
- Get the coins out of Coinbase by sending them to an online wallet with blockchain.info or another web based wallet. The coins are now under my control but still potentially traceable to me at this point since they came from Coinbase who knows my real identity.
- Download Armory and set up an offline wallet. The addresses in this wallet will be anonymous so far.
- Use blockchain.info's Send Anonymously feature to send the coins to my Armory offline wallet. The coins should now be under my anonymous control but not traceable to me any more.
- If I want to spend the coins from the Anonymous wallet, I need to cloak my IP address by using Tor or an anonymous VPN at the moment of sending the coins to another address.
I appreciate your constructive critique of the above, or suggestions for alternatives.