What to do with my new node.

[Jet Cash]

I'm a few hours away from finalising the synchronisation of my new node, and I need to decide how far to push it. I'm in the same situation as many other members with several wallets, and multiple addresses. Some are empty, and some have many small transactions. I've got one old wallet on a notebook that died, and I want to remove the hard drive, and recover the coins in the wallet. I've got a pruned node on an external HDD that I don't use, and a variety of backups on external drives and usb sticks. My idea is to use the new node as a central hub, and copy the blockchain and add various wallet files to a new drive to try to recover coins. I can the send those to an address on the new node wallet. This will consolidate micro payments as well as collecting my coins in a manageable wallet.

I appreciate the dangers of using on central wallet on an active notebook, especially when Internet connection are made over public WiFi. During my consolidation process, I can decide on some other storage options such as hard wallets and air gapped wallets. It would also be useful to have a wallet on my mobile.

We are entering a period of banking and financial turbulence. In the UK, we are facing an increase if government control and investigation of crypto holdings, and I understand that at the end of this month the new UK laws will be activated allowing the police and other government entities to seize crypto assets. In view of these changes, do you think I am taking a sensible approach to protect my long term Bitcoin holdings?

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[m2017]

We are entering a period of banking and financial turbulence. In the UK, we are facing an increase if government control and investigation of crypto holdings, and I understand that at the end of this month the new UK laws will be activated allowing the police and other government entities to seize crypto assets. In view of these changes, do you think I am taking a sensible approach to protect my long term Bitcoin holdings?

Considering this factor (the tendency of governments to put their paws on the cryptowallets of ordinary users, which doesn't surprise me), maybe you shouldn’t keep “all your eggs in one basket” and it would be better to diversify risks by distributing your crypto assets across different wallets? Isn’t it wiser to store bitcoin in different wallets, so that in case of losses (associated with legal confiscation or theft) to minimize these same losses? It seems, in such a case, it is more prudent to keep a wallet with a small amount in order to give it to government agencies upon their legal request.

[Jet Cash]

That was more or less what I was thinking. I plan to use this node to maintain a full blockchain, and then I can create a wallet on a pruned node on another machine. I was thinking of doing that on the netbook with a removable ssd to hold the blockchain and wallet info. It's probably not wise to talk about it too much, although I'm not so bothered about paying taxes on my earnings, as long as I can keep the balance after I've paid the taxes.

[DaveF]

.... In the UK, we are facing an increase if government control and investigation of crypto holdings, and I understand that at the end of this month the new UK laws will be activated allowing the police and other government entities to seize crypto assets. In view of these changes, do you think I am taking a sensible approach to protect my long term Bitcoin holdings?

Not to ruin your day but the government has ALWAYS had the right to seize your assets if they wanted to. Cash / gold / crypto / whatever if they want it it's theirs.
The laws coming down just give more guidance and specificity.

Going with that theory start using a hardware wallet this way if someone takes your laptop they can't do anything with the wallet files on there.

https://hwi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/bitcoin-core-usage.html

Some things will take some time to configure and play with but it does add a level of security and unless they want to $5 wrench your pin code out of you then you should be good.



-Dave

[un_rank]

In the UK, we are facing an increase if government control and investigation of crypto holdings, and I understand that at the end of this month the new UK laws will be activated allowing the police and other government entities to seize crypto assets. In view of these changes, do you think I am taking a sensible approach to protect my long term Bitcoin holdings?

The last news I read about crypto regulations in the U.K was the government trying to regulate service providers like exchanges, mixers and the likes. Are there any updated rules regarding holders of Bitcoin and what they can do wrong that will attract the authorities? This is where to start to protect yourself.

Keeping your bitcoins private until such a time when you will be required to declare profits on your tax file is a form of protection too. You get plausible deniability which also protect your from other entities that may want to steal your coins.

- Jay -

[Jet Cash]

I believe the new laws will allow Police and other state entities to lock wallets, seize coins, and burn them if they want to. It seems they don't even have to claim they are the proceeds of crime. This new law comes into force at the end of this month.

I'm more interested in exploring the hard drives I've got to find what I own. I think I have some BAT as well, but that wallet has probably been closed, if it hasn't I'll try to transfer it into Bitcoin. That's one transaction that will need some care, as I needed to provide KYC to Uphold to open the wallet. Transferring the coins to an address that didn't have any KYC transactions would compromise the address. That raises another caution, if I am consolidating micro-transactions, then I don't want to mix addresses if one of them had a KYC transaction. I'm not so worried about $5 wrenches, as I could set up a multi-sig wallet. I'm a Gemini, so I could use both personalities.

I'm more interested in the possibilities of installing core on another machine, copying the blockchain and associated files from my new node, and adding the wallet data from one of the old hard drives. If I can then access any coins in the wallet, I can send them to an address on the master node, or just import the address to save fees.

[DaveF]

If you are talking about this BAT: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/ then there are a few non KYC places to trade it if it's in a wallet you control. If you already sent it to Uphold then yeah you need KYC. But then you can move it to a non KYC exchange and then to your wallet.

Back to this. Keep in mind the more places you have your wallet.dat / private keys the more secure you are in case something goes wrong.
BUT the other part of that is the more places you have it, the more vulnerable you are to someone getting access to them because they are in more places.

-Dave

[SamReomo]

I think you're taking a sensible approach to protect your long term Bitcoin holdings, but still it's not possible to dodge government for long time. I believe you should first try to recover your old wallet that you have lost due to dead laptop as that should be your main priority.

As long as you use a reputable VPN over public wifi that doesn't have logs, you may not face any issues even using a public wifi. If you really want to save your holdings for long term then you may move to another place where government doesn't interfere with crypto holders.

If you have a loved one in other country whom you could trust then that person might help you in saving your crypto assets in current situation, but it's really hard to trust someone as a crypto holder. That's why the approach you're following is the best one in current situation.

[Jet Cash]

This is one of the difficulties I find in using public WiFi. Yesterday it said I needed just 3 hours to completion, this morning the network speed is down to 1K Kb/s, and it wants 9 hours.
I'm not too worried about security, well I am, but I'm taking precautions. I've removed Chromium from the Netbook, and I haven't enabled bluetooth. This means I will have to do everything through the terminal. I guess the machine has become focused on crypto recovery, and hard drive exploration. I can also disconnect the WiFi when I don't need it.

The Netbook is very underpowered with 2Gb of RAM and a celeron processor. The SSD is pretty small as well. I want to install Bitcoin Core, and link it to the directories on the various drives. These will be in USB cases. I'm assuming that with no WiFi, Core will not be updating anything, but it will allow me to perform various recovery functions through its command line, This will be a great way to bring my knowledge of Bitcoin up to current standards. Once I've gained access to a funded wallet, I can move the addresses into the new main node. This will  give me a chance to assess my current holdings, and decide on a future savings plan.