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Living A Bitcoin Double Life: KYC Bitcoin vs. Private Bitcoin

Living A Bitcoin Double Life: KYC Bitcoin vs. Private Bitcoin

As the world seems to continue to take steps towards uncertainty, the need to own bitcoin becomes more and more clear. As bitcoin adoption continues to expand, large centralized institutions are willing to take even more desperate steps to slow bitcoin’s growth around the world. In order to escape the tightening restrictions on bitcoin users worldwide, we need to be adaptable and learn how to keep our KYC bitcoin completely separate from any private sats that we are able to stack. While it is difficult to avoid buying bitcoin from KYC platforms, it’s always a good idea to live a bitcoin double life and have at least some bitcoin that are not attached to your real-world identity.

In this article, I will discuss the significance of “living a bitcoin double life”. One bitcoin identity for compliant and identified transactions that are attached to your social credit score and another bitcoin stack for private use that is not connected to your real-world identity. If enough of us are all taking the necessary steps, we can all increase our own privacy substantially while marginally increasing the privacy of ever other bitcoin user in the world.

Buy Bitcoin Around The World

Living A Bitcoin Double Life

As soon as you come to the realization that bitcoin is the greatest money in history, the next natural step is to start accumulating as much as you can as quickly as you can. The obvious first thing that most people do is jump online and begin their journey down the bitcoin rabbit hole learning some of the basics of bitcoin. Once you make it so far down your own rabbit hole, it’s only a matter of time before you come to the conclusion that you absolutely need bitcoin.

Aside form some tiny amounts that you can earn with lightning, buying bitcoin is the first and easiest way to stack any meaningful amount of bitcoin. When you search “How to buy bitcoin” or just “Buy Bitcoin”, search engines and AI will all give you the same basic list of resources. Exchanges not only have risen to the top of search results because they are in the business of selling bitcoin but they also pay for ads that place them at the top of search results.

These centralized bitcoin vendors are the obvious first choice for buying bitcoin for most since they have plenty of bitcoin for sale, they make it easy to buy, and have edicated support teams to help the newer users avoid some of the pitfalls of learning how to use bitcoin.

For those of us who see that there is an obvious war on bitcoin and privacy around the world, we may be looking for a way to stack some bitcoin privately to avoid having it attached to our real-world identity. In order to ensure that you don’t sacrifice any potential privacy gains from stacking private sats, it’s best practice to live a bitcoin double life and completely separate your tainted KYC bitcoin from your private bitcoin.

KYC Sats Are A Problem

If you’re unfamiliar with what “KYC sats” or “KYC Bitcoin” means, it is any bitcoin that is directly attached to your real-world identity due to legal requirements that are forced onto bitcoin exchanges and other platforms that sell bitcoin.

Buying KYC sats requires your legal name, address, date of birth, national identification number, a photo of at least one government issued photo ID, a selfie of you from the front AND side, and sometimes even a photo of you holding that same government issued photo ID. Some of these selfie photos even require you to pass a “liveness test” to ensure that you are not a robot, AI, wearing a mask, or even dead.

That is some absolutely absurd amount of regulation just to buy some digital bits of information on the internet.

Naturally, the powers that require these sorts of data collection schemes all say that it “for your own safety and to protect us from terrorist financing” even though it has been proven time and time again that terrorists prefer to use traditional financial institutions like Chase bank to launder their ill gotten gains to finance some of the most heinous acts known to man. It’s funny how KYC regulations don’t seem to actually stop any terror financing.

The truth is that they don’t really care if terrorists use bitcoin. In Reality, tey don’t want honest working-class people to use bitcoin because if enough of us do, then every fiat currency in the world will collapse.

So, what can we do to fight back against these onerous regulations? Well, we can do all that is in our power to get non-KYC sats or what may bitcoiners like to call private sats. Some like to call them ethical or honest sats.

Private Sats Are The Solution

Obviously we all want to be able to stack sats without any sort of bureaucracy. Without knowing it, we all wish we could just buy bitcoin as easily as we can buy a can of soda at a vending machine. Unfortunately, due to KYC regulations and the onerous war on bitcoin, it is incredibly difficult to avoid having to surrender your entire identity just to be able to buy even a small amount of bitcoin.

If you have been in bitcoin for a while, then you’re likely already aware of all of the best places to buy bitcoin privately both online and offline. You probably also have a network of bitcoiner friends from your local meetup who are willing to pay each other with bitcoin. You might even go so far as to mine bitcoin instead of buying it from an exchange.

No matter how you stack private bitcoin, you are taking part in what I like to call “Bitcoin stacktivism” and it is the only real way to bring about any meaningful change at scale.

Become A Node Runner

While this may not be common knowledge, if you are not running your own full node, then you have no real expectation of technical bitcoin privacy. Each and every time you open your bitcoin wallet, it needs to check all of the addresses to give you the most up-to-date address balance info. In order to do this, your wallet has to ask a bitcoin node the balance of all of your addresses and the total balance. When it does this, every single address in your wallet (both used and unused) are given to whatever node your wallet connects to and it might be stored indefinitely. There is no way for you to know for sure if that node is run by a chain analysis company or not so you have to assume that all of the bitcoin addresses in your wallet are linked to each other if you ever connect to a public bitcoin node.

This is especially problematic of you have both KYC and private bitcoin in that wallet. Now all of your addresses can be linked to each other because they all belong to the same wallet. Any privacy gained by stacking some private sats is now gone because some random node on the internet knows that all of the addresses in your wallet belong to the same entity. This is even more troublesome if the same chain analysis node has all of your KYC data and knows your real-world identity.

Running your own bitcoin node is the beginning of maximizing your own bitcoin privacy and an important part of living a bitcoin double life. When you connect your own wallet to your own bitcoin node, you don’t leak any of your wallet info to third parties and thus you do not link all of your addresses together.

As soon as you are running your own bitcoin node, the next step is to actually get some private sats.

Accept Bitcoin As Payment

I cannot count the number of times I have said that the absolute best way to stack sats is to accept bitcoin as payment. Whenever you accept bitcoin as payment, not only are you receiving bitcoin without having to surrender any personal information about yourself but you are also growing the bitcoin circular economy.

Practice Good UTXO Privacy

Stacking private sats is not enough all by itself. You need to take some steps to maintain and preserve your privacy after you actually stack some private sats. Following some of the most basic bitcoin “hygiene” is important to keep your private sats as private as they can be.

  • Label Your UTXOs: Make sure you know where all of your bitcoin comes from and label each payment so you don’t accidentally merge certain inputs when sending.
  • Do Not Merge Private UTXOs with KYC UTXOs: Keeping your UTXOs completely segregated will prevent you from accidentally merging inputs when you send and effectively doxx your private bitcoin.
  • Avoid Merging Inputs Unless Absolutely Necessary: When sending bitcoin, try to use the smallest number of UTXOs to avoid linking addresses together.
  • Avoid Address Clusters & Peeling Chains: Avoid long chains of address clusters by keeping UTXOs relatively small (1-2 millions sats is probably good), avoid address reuse, avoid merging inputs as much as you reasonably can.
  • Use Lightning To Send/Receive Payments: Use lightning for sending and receiving smaller payments to avoid making small UTXOs that will need to be merged in the future.
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    Use Burner Phone Numbers

    Something as simple as having a second phone number might prove to be a great way to protect yourself from unwanted search or seizure of your bitcoin. If you need to buy bitcoin from an ATM or any other service that might require a phone number to receive verification texts, a burner phone could be a great way to avoid having to surrender the phone number that is attached to your real-world identity.

    Use Burner Wallets

    Using a burner wallet can be a simple way to live a bitcoin double life and add a layer of protection between the wallet that you use to receive bitcoin initially and the wallet that you use for long term savings. By adding a burner wallet between transactions, you can delete it after you have zero’d out the balance and protect the privacy of your bitcoin stack

    For instance, if you buy from a Bitcoin ATM, don’t receive directly to your final cold storage bitcoin wallet. Receive payment to a burner wallet and ideally CoinJoin it to it’s final destination wallet. As soon as you have completed your CoinJoin, delete the burner wallet and have some nice private sats that belong to your alternate persona.

    One simple way to use a burner wallet that doesn’t require any personal information is with progressive web apps like Mutiny Wallet.

    Use An Alias Or A Nym Online

    While the average bitcoiner doesn’t have any desire to do anything more than use bitcoin as a superior method for saving for a better future, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t bad actors out there will hurt you to get your bitcoin. One of the most common methods for protecting yourself from any potential wrench attacks is to use a different name and profile picture online.

    While this may come as a surprise to you, my real name is not Jon Hodl. That’s just a nym that I use online to protect myself from low-level attacks like a $5 wrench attack.

    Bifurcate Your Bitcoin Stack

    In order to live a bitcoin double life, you need to be able to separate your KYC bitcoin from your private bitcoin by creating 2 separate wallets that are completely unrelated to each other. This means that you will need to generate two completely different seed phrases that have absolutely no connection to each other at all. While it is technically possible to just use a BIP39 passphrase to make 2 completely different wallets with the same seed phrase, it is best practice to completely bifurcate your stack with different seed phrases.

    Like I mentioned before, in order to effectively live a bitcoin double life with these two wallets, you need to take some basic steps towards privacy before you ever do this by running your own bitcoin node. If you are not running your own bitcoin node, then you run the risk of having all of your addresses linked to each other when your wallet connects to a third-party node to update all of your address balances.

    Final Thoughts

    Protecting yourself and your bitcoin is not a simple 0 to 1 switch that you can just turn on or off with a single action. It takes time to learn and implement the necessary steps to maximize your own bitcoin privacy. If you are already running your own node, then you can begin to implement the steps to stack sats privately and begin living your bitcoin double life. One stack that is completely compromised and tainted by the KYC social credit system and another that is private peer

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