Hardware wallets like Trezor and Ledger are terrible choice for privacy as they’re more like hot wallets. You need to download their shitty electron app to configure your wallet and even if these apps are open-source I can’t consider them safe, because they have toooooo much features. At the same time they’re missing basic features like connecting through TOR network to them which should be must have as they rely heavily on internet features like online exchanges which can easily reveal your data.
Do you have any idea how to access crypto easily while at the same keep it private and safe?
how to access crypto easily while at the same keep it private and safe?
These are conflicting requirements, true for all valuables: more accessible is less safe, more secure is harder to access. The solution is to split up your money in levels.
-
Some hot crypto on your phone, like cash in your wallet. I keep about $100 of monero on my phone, ready to spend if I meet an accepting merchant.
-
Similarly, leave some hot crypto on the exchange if you trade regularly.
-
Some warm crypto on your pc, locked, secured, protected by dog and gun. This is like your checking account, ready to send to an exchange if fiat is needed on a rainy day.
-
Everything else in air-gapped cold storage. Bury the seed phrases and tell no one. This is your “savings account”, the stuff you will hodl and pass on to your kin, with no plans to ever sell.
-
What you really need is an air gapped or cold storage and you can achieve this in many ways. I found that one of the best ways to do it is grabbing an old phone and following this guide. TLDR: install the software wallet and never connect the phone to the internet again and use QR codes to sign transactions using the camera. Practical, cheap, truly air gapped and doesn’t attract attention like a hardware wallet.
If the air-gapped phone is stolen, is guessing the PIN to unlock the phone the only thing stopping the thief from spending the victim’s money at that point?
There are a couple of things you can do:
- Hide the app from the app drawer. To open the app you have to go to settings and look for the complete app listing which include system apps. Search how to hide an app for your particular android version.
- Connect the phone to the computer and install the wallet as a system app using adb. Being a system appt you can disable it from the app’s context menu and the app will not be visible. To open it you have to enable it from the settings.
In both cases is extremely improbable that someone that grabs it will start to look for hidden or disabled apps in an old and seemingly discarded phone. That’s why nobody has to know that you save your keys in this way. Just grab an old phone, the older, cheaper and unatractive the better. Nature teaches us that disguise is the best way to hide. And in case is stolen, you have a good amount of time to move your coins to another wallet.
If you want privacy you should be using Monero. If you use Monero you can use the official wallet together with Trezor. In fact, if I am not mistaken you have to, because from what I recall the Trezor Suite has no support for Monero.
If you’re down voting please share with your opinion in comments why you don’t like that much my post.
Because of this comment
Yeah you’re not entitled to people’s time cause they downvoted you OP.
People don’t like crypto around here - me neither, the only thing I know about crypto privacy is that samurai-thing whose owner was arrested on bogus claims of money laundering
Understandable. In the past I was fascinated with this idea, but trying to use this in practice disappointed me completely. I’m starting to doubt in it.
You can have the best wallet in the world and not be private because you’ve not been using a private cryptocurrency. There’s no amount of wallet privacy features that hides the fact that a certain address holds a certain amount or that a certain transaction has been taken place on a certain point in time.
The only cryptocurrency (that I know of) that has reliably granted these guarantees is Monero, so I’d recommend to use that if what you desire is utmost privacy. However, Monero isn’t known to be a good investment, it’s a good currency (as far as I am concerned), so you might not want to hold significant amounts of money in form of Monero.That being said, you usually only require the wallet vendor software to install apps on and update the firmware of a hardware wallet. After that you can use your hardware wallet with a compatible software of your choosing.
You can also use a paper wallet of some kind (I think there are even some metal ones, but I don’t know how you etch your seed words into them or how else they might work). You’d usually want to use some form of encryption on those though and then you got to store a secure key somewhere or rely on your brain to memorize an insecure one. Both aren’t really superior to just using a encrypted wallet file on one or more storage medias. Technically you could even apply something like Shamir’s Secret Sharing to make a M-out-of-N backup (basically multisig, but applyable to all kinds of things).
Personally I don’t think there’s a perfect solution here. You have to die one death or another.
Yeah, I’m thinking about storing Monero.
Not a good idea. The value changes rapidly.
So what do you recommend for storing money privately (except cash)?
Use an unfreezable stable coin like DAI and convert to monero when you want to make private transactions. Never attach the ETH address with the stablecoin to your identity in any way no KYC or anything.
Since by design cryptocurrencies aren’t backed by banks/nations and any transaction is permanent, they are by definition not safe.
At best, you can save out your wallet to an encrypted drive, then write it back to your phone when you need to use it. Make copies, so if one gets lost, you don’t lose the value itself.
For me it’s argument why they might be safe. Of course cryptocurrencies in my opinion aren’t that safe and I have reasons to think like that, but I don’t agree with your agument.
