A Blog by Expatriotic

Acquiring

If you enjoy the post, throw a few sats to help this dissatisfied employee of the rat race.

Get a Bitcoin wallet.

This represents my stack, there are obviously other wallets out there.

  1. Ashigaru🔥 Tor🧅 link - Really slick UX.
    • Includes features such as Ricochet (adding hops, useful sometimes if you're trying to break chain analysis heuristics)
    • Stonewall (A tx with yourself where you appear to be two parties collaborating in a spend)
    • StonewallX2
    • Bip 47 Paynyms
    • Need access to a Dojo node which is at the end of this blog post here.
  2. Envoy
    • Supports the creation of one hot wallet
    • Coin control
    • Tor
    • Multiple ways of backing up wallet. Pneumonic phrase or encrypted micro SD, or encrypted blob to icloud
    • Also helpful in managing your Foundation Passport wallet if you have one
  3. Sparrow - Hands down best desktop wallet ever.
    • Has great defaults
    • Coin control
    • Tool to verify FOSS software with devs PGP keys
    • Wallet search tool
    • Stonewall sends by default when possible (where you use two UTXOs when spending which appears as a two-party StonewallX2)
  4. Zeus - Lightning embedded node (THE NODE IS ON THE PHONE! 🤯)
    • Blinded routes
    • Multipath payments
    • Opening channels with taproot
    • Can purchase inbound liquidity with the Olympus LSP
    • By default has an onchain wallet
    • Supports linking hardware wallets which can be used to open lightning channels also.
  5. Cake Wallet - A swiss army knife of a wallet.
    • Enables you to buy many different gift cards for restaurants, shopping, flights, hotels, or just as money (up to 4,999 USD for pre-paid Visa and 1,000 for pre-paid mastercard)
    • Utilize LLMs paid for in-app
    • Allows swapping to monero
    • Buying in app is available
    • Tor

Fund it.

Tools: KYCnot.me

Rational: No KYC

  1. Bisq - The best option, Uses Tor, can find low premiums, even to the point of getting bitcoins below market price. But better to be the maker as takers pay 10x the fee.
  2. Hodl Hodl - Avoid careful of counterparties that ask you to KYC. Be sure to at least use VPN when using it. Better yet use via Tor Browser.
  3. Robosats - Uses Tor, Uses Lightning, has almost scarily low deposits, and no reputation system. If you want to swap into onchain bitcoins use boltz swap
  4. Peach App - Based in Switzerland and follows their regulations, known for their speedy transactions, doesn't use Tor by default, but you can use orbot to make your phone's traffic route through Tor.

Signing devices

These help keep your private key offline.

  1. FOUNDATION Passport/Prime🔥
  2. SeedSigner - Bitcoin only. Based team and value prop. DIY. Look into it if you want a cheap, DIY, non-persistent signing device. Especially useful for multi-sig and combatting potential supply chain issues with a single HWW vendor.
  3. Jade (never used it) - Bitcoin only.
  4. Trezor - Multi-coin, but can change firmware to be Bitcoin only. Used it, but don't recommend buying if you don't already have one. There's no secure element and physical access by a malicious party could result in loss of funds.
  5. Ledger - Multi-coin. Team is antithetical to all things Bitcoin. Avoid at all costs.
  6. Cold Card

Nodes

Run your own if possible.

  1. Build a server and run Debian or Ubuntu if you're based enough. Ministry of Nodes can help with that.

  2. Start9 - Pre-built server with the Start operating system. They package things like the bitcoin node, jellyfin etc. and help with dependencies. Plug and play.

  3. StartOS - DIY version of Start9. You need to be handy with building your own server.

  4. Dojo - The specific Bitcoin node implementation that is needed to run Ashigaru or Samourai Wallet

    • Ministry of Nodes
    • BTC Sessions
    • Dojo Bay - If you can't spin up your own dojo node, but want to use Ashigaru, you can use someone elses. There is a trade-off of privacy using someone elses privacy, but if you're not already running your own node, you're already exposing your addresses and transactions to some node without realising it. You may prefer to chose someone on this list whom you trust. (Sparrow desktop wallet has a similar feature where you can elect to use a trusted node like Seth for Privacy's node or the like.)

I probably had my toddler screaming in the background as I wrote this.

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