Understanding and using bitcoin is a journey. It’s not something that you learn in a day. It’s something that takes years of research, experimenting, making mistakes, adapting your needs, and figuring out what works best for you. My Bitcoin journey will obviously not be the same as yours but after years of research, experimenting, and learning from my mistakes, here is how I am building a Bitcoin standard in my own life and within my network of influence.
My Bitcoin Journey
Over the years, I’ve had a number of different people ask me how I use bitcoin. Some have asked me where I buy bitcoin while others ask me what wallets I use or how to use bitcoin anonymously. My personal journey towards a Bitcoin standard has been a long road filled with lots of learning and amazing people along the way. From meetups to thousands of hours of research, I have discovered some of the best tools to use bitcoin privately, securely, and with a lot of functionality.
Here are all of my must-have tools for building a Bitcoin standard and achieving the greatest level of freedom that I possibly can. All of the tools and methods listed below are related to my 8 key steps towards hyperbitcoinization (I will reference these 8 steps multiple times in this article). As each one of us seeks to exit the fiat system and works towards our own personal Bitcoin standard, we all move one step closer to global hyperbitcoinization.
How I Stack Sats
Stacking sats is the first of 8 steps to hyperbitcoinization. It’s one of the most important steps to securing your own financial future as well as generations that will come after you.
My journey towards a Bitcoin standard began with buying bitcoin from a centralized exchange but as I have ventured further down the rabbit hole, I’ve discovered new tools that greatly increase my privacy as well as other bitcoiners. Here’s how I stack sats privately as well as from a few KYC platforms.
I’m an American so these KYC platforms are US based but depending on where you live, you can find your own local variants of KYC on-ramps. The private and decentralized services that I use to stack sats are available in every country in the world that has internet but may be limited by payment options.
1. Stacking Non-KYC Sats
Stacking non-KYC sats is the way that bitcoin was intended to be used. It’s the reason that Satoshi created bitcoin in the first place. If he wanted bitcoin to rely on intermediaries, he would have just created another bank. One of the core values behind why bitcoin was created is because the purpose of money is to not know your customer and banks and KYC are a grotesque violation of that.
There are a few ways to stack non-KYC sats. I use any and all of them whenever I possibly can but some are easier than others. To avoid using the words of the enemy (central banks and the corporations that have grown up around them), for the rest of this article, I will refer to non-KYC sats as private sats.
I do everything from accepting bitcoin as payment, buying from decentralized exchanges, buying from ATMs with lax KYC practices, redeeming Azteco vouchers, and any other means I come across.
Unfortunately, aside from mining bitcoin and accepting donations, there isn’t really an effective way to auto-stack private sats because auto-stacking implies that you automatically buy and that tends to require an ACH draft from your bank account or something capable of automatically charging your bank account. Using any sort of bank account to buy bitcoin means that you are using a fully KYC’d payment method to stack sats.
Learning how to stack sats without having to surrender my identity has been an important part of my own personal journey and an incredibly important part of building a Bitcoin standard around the world.
2. Accepting Bitcoin As Payment
Accepting bitcoin as payment is the absolute best way to stack sats. It doesn’t require you to surrender all of your personal information with a Bitcoin exchange or brokerage. It doesn’t require expensive mining hardware or an understanding of the game theory of bitcoin mining.
All you need to accept bitcoin is a Bitcoin wallet. That’s it.
Whenever I accept bitcoin as payment, not only am I stacking private sats but I am also growing bitcoin’s circular economy by enabling someone else to spend their bitcoin as money. You achieve step 1 and they achieve step 7 of the 8 steps toward hyperbitcoinization. That’s a win-win. I avoid buying from a KYC platform and they avoid sending to a KYC platform (which is the worst thing you can do with private sats).
3. Accepting Donations
Accepting Bitcoin donations is a great way to automatically stack private sats since you easily set up a PayNym (with Sparrow wallet or Samourai wallet) and/or set up a BTCPay Server to begin accepting Bitcoin payments. Here’s the catch. Nobody is just going to give you money unless you provide some sort of value to the rest of the Bitcoin community so you need to be doing something of value to get donations. I hope this site is enough to earn a value-for-value donation from the plebs like you.
Here is my PayNym: +stillboat7CD
You can also use services like Tippin.me and Stacker.News to earn micro donations on the lightning network.
Since all of these methods for accepting donations are passive and automatic, I consider them auto-stacking and are a great way to remove your emotions from the price volatility with a DCA. For anything that requires me to take some sort of action to get bitcoin, I would consider standard stacking.
4. Buying On Robosats
RoboSats is a P2P Bitcoin exchange that I run on my Umbrel node. I can also run it entirely within a Tor browser but when I run a RoboSats instance on my Umbrel, I am decentralizing and hosting the exchange itself so I prefer to do that. It is one of the absolute best tools to build a Bitcoin standard.
What I like about Robosats is that the buyers/sellers set their % premium price and the order book fluctuates with the price of bitcoin. That ensures that there’s liquidity and that if the price dumps, my buy order also goes down and I don’t end up buying bitcoin for way over the new lower spot price. The same is true for sellers. If the price pumps and they’re selling X% over the spot price, they end up making even more money than if they had a fixed sell order on other exchange order books.
The downside of RoboSats is that it requires some sats on lightning to create a buy order so a complete noob without any sats is unable to use the platform until they get at least a few thousand sats.
5. Buying On Bisq
Bisq is very similar to RoboSats but instead of running on my node, I have to download the software and then run it from my desktop. Just like with RoboSats, you can buy with an array of payment methods from fully KYC methods like a bank transfer all the way to cash by mail or even a face-to-face meet-up.
Personally, I don’t suggest buying through these services using any KYC fiat system like Cash App, PayPal, Venmo, Revolut, etc. because those are all KYC platforms on their own, and using them with a non-KYC on-ramp creates an opportunity for your personal info being compromised or doxxed by the counterparty. If you’re going to use either of these services, stick to non-KYC payment methods.
6. Mining Bitcoin
Bitcoin mining is not currently one of my stacking methods but it’s the best way to auto-stack private sats with a DCA via your electric bill. You set up your mining hardware and effectively just convert electricity into sats. If you live in a colder climate, you can use surplus heat from Bitcoin mining to heat your home. It’s a beautiful thing.
Since I am not currently mining, I don’t have any insight on how to do it yourself but there are some great tutorials online. Even if I currently had mining hardware, I am not sure if it is a better idea to buy bitcoin or mine it with the current cost of electricity and the ever-rising hashrate.
Stacking KYC Sats
Until we defeat KYC at the political level, the unfortunate reality is that KYC Bitcoin exchanges are the dominant means of buying bitcoin. This means that our ability to buy private sats at scale is incredibly limited. Obviously, I stack private sats whenever, wherever, and however I can but to fill in the gaps, I stack KYC sats from a few US-based companies.
Since stacking KYC sats requires a low technical understanding of bitcoin, I refer many of my pre-coiner friends and family to platforms with dedicated customer support departments. That almost always means a KYC exchange until they are far enough down the bitcoin rabbit hole and they start asking me the right questions. Dedicated support departments can help with onboarding, troubleshooting and any other issues they may have in their early stages of learning. Once my friends and family have ventured far enough down the rabbit hole and start asking me the right questions, I refer them to the non-KYC on-ramps mentioned above so they can stack sats privately. So far, none of them are convicted enough to buy via any non-KYC on-ramps but maybe that will change as more non-KYC platforms become available and more people start spending bitcoin.
While I do what I can to get people to care about freedom, privacy, and self-sovereignty, I realize that not everyone understands they have a problem until it’s too late. Learning that private sats are far more valuable than any KYC sats has been a critical part of my personal journey. Although they are fully KYC’d on-ramps, these services are all excellent tools for building a Bitcoin standard.
1. Swan
I primarily auto-stack with Swan (affiliate) because their business model helps users to complete 3 of the 8 steps to hyperbitcoinization and another one on the way with their new Bitcoin wallet acquisition which will enable users to secure their seed phrases (step 2) by generating their own entropy entirely offline.
- Swan sells bitcoin via DCA (step 1)
- Swan facilitates and encourages self-custody via automatic withdrawals (step 3)
- Swan doesn’t allow bitcoin to be deposited. (step 6)
Swan is a one-way valve from fiat into bitcoin that incentivizes self-custody and cannot be sold back to Swan. They also just recently acquired the open source wallet, Specter which is one of the hardware wallet devices that you can use to calculate the final checksum word of a seed phrase. This is an incredibly important part of writing your seed phrase (step 2), but I will get to that in a minute.
Swan fees are also a flat rate 0.99% which is the lowest that I have found so that’s a nice bonus.
It’s bad enough to stack sats from KYC platforms but it’s even worse to send bitcoin to KYC platforms and enable them to retrospectively analyze the history of whatever sats you send them. IMHO, sending private sats to a KYC exchange is an attack on bitcoin. It’s one of the worst things that you can do for yourself, and the network of bitcoiners as a whole. If you are serious about helping bitcoin, avoid sending private sats to any KYC platform. Swan doesn’t allow deposits so they make it impossible for you to open yourself up to this attack vector. Even though it’s a full KYC platform, it is still an excellent tool for building a Bitcoin standard.
2. Cash App
Cash App (affiliate) is another great tool for DCA (not as good as Swan) but Cash App is more than just a tool to buy bitcoin. It’s both a fiat tool and a Bitcoin tool. It’s what checking accounts should have always been. In fact, I would argue that Cash App is probably the best US based banking service to have until we achieve hyperbitcoinization because it enables you to interact with both the legacy financial system as well as the Bitcoin network.
Cash App offers direct deposit, check deposits, paper money deposits, a debit card, sending/receiving fiat between CashApp users, stock buys/sells, sending bitcoin both on-chain and on lightning, and even the ability to earn some small Bitcoin reward “boosts” for spending fiat at select locations. (CashApp Bitcoin rewards can’t compare the Fold card sats back rewards though).
It’s a very powerful tool for building a Bitcoin standard because it bridges the gap between the legacy fiat banking system and bitcoin. If you live in the United States, I highly recommend using Cash App for its fiat functionality until you’re living entirely on a Bitcoin standard. It is one of the absolute best tools to stack KYC sats in the US.
3. Fold
Fold (affiliate) is one of the absolute best methods for stacking KYC sats in the United States. If you ever use a credit or debit card, Fold is the best tool for stacking sats on over-the-counter purchases. This is especially true with the Fold card. Gas, groceries, rent, tools, meat, date night, plane tickets, and any entertainment all go on my Fold card so I can stack those reward sats.
I also occasionally buy things on Amazon, Home Depot, REI, Uber, and maybe a couple of other Fold gift card partner stores. When I do, I use my Fold card to buy gift cards and then use the gift cards to make my purchases at those stores. I stack a lot more sats when I buy the gift cards compared to when I buy directly with my Fold card.
Additional bonus: If you don’t mind using a KYC platform, you can use Fold to buy bitcoin on RoboSats. You use Fold to buy Amazon gift cards at like a 5% discount and then use the gift card to place a buy order with RoboSats. While this might be an easy way to stack sats, it’s not very private. Each gift card you purchase o this way can be associated with your Fold card so this is more of a KYC-lite option to buy bitcoin.
4. Miscellaneous Stacking
There are some other smaller services that I use or experiment with such as affiliate referral commissions, tips, donations, faucets, ads, etc. All of them combined don’t amount to any meaningful amount of sats but hopefully one day they will.
It’s my hope and objective to one day be able to work full-time on this website so it is my plan to one day make these the primary methods of stacking sats.
Quick Recap: These are all of the different ways that I stack both private sats and KYC sats. First and foremost, I accept bitcoin as payment because it is the best way to provide value to the Bitcoin economy. It allows me to stack private sats and lets the counter-party spend their bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash. Until I am able to only stack private sats, I use some US-based companies to buy KYC sats.
Once I have stacked some sats, I need to move them to my own wallet which means that I need to make sure that my seed phrase is secure.
How I Secure My Seed Phrase
Learning how to secure my seed phrase has also been another incredibly important part of my personal journey and building a Bitcoin standard. If you don’t properly secure your seed phrase, then you run the risk of losing all of your bitcoin. This took me a while to fully understand but I have finally settled on a method that I believe to be the best possible way to secure my seed phrase.
I have identified 4 key steps to secure your seed phrase and I have written a dedicated article for each step.
- How To Securely Generate Your Seed Phrase (Entropy & Verification)
- How To Securely Write Your Seed Phrase (Paper & Metal)
- How To Safely Store Your Seed Phrase (Location)
- How To Safely Recover Your Bitcoin Wallet (Security, Privacy, & Wallet Settings)
Each one of these 4 steps are incredibly important in their own way. If you generate your seed phrase with corrupted software, then it doesn’t matter if you stamp it into titanium and keep it in an acid-proof safe on Mars because your seed phrase is compromised before you ever write it down.
Writing your seed down is another important part of security. Maybe you only have access to plain paper, or even better, maybe you have access to more reliable seed phrase storage products to inscribe your words into metal.
All of that being said, I will go into a little bit of detail on how I secure my own seed phrases.
Generating My Own Seed Phrases
Generating my seed phrases has been a long journey from my first Bitcoin mobile wallet that just gave me 12 words that I wrote down on paper to generating my own seed phrases with 256 bits of entropy and an open source air-gapped signing device today. As I have ventured further down the rabbit hole over the years, it’s become more and more obvious to me that I need to generate my own entropy, punch my words into metal, and store store it in a safe location.
I generate new seed phrases all the time for all sorts of different reasons.
Technically, I think that flipping a coin 256 times is the most random way with the least amount of bias but I personally prefer to use my SeedSticks because I like the speed I can generate a 23 of the 24 seed words with a high level of entropy (randomness). After I have my first 23 seed words, I can use my SeedSigner to calculate the final checksum word. SeedSticks are also a great tool to help teach all of my friends and family about seed phrases how the BIP 39 word list works.
Writing Down My Seed Phrases
Since I generate new seed phrases all the time for different things and most of them will only ever hold a small amount of bitcoin, I don’t need to stamp every one of them into high-grade metal. Some of the seed phrases I generate are just fine being written on standard paper while some can withstand damages from everything from acid to 2,000+ degree (Fahrenheit) house fires. With different amounts of bitcoin and various risks, I use an array of tools to write down my seed phrases.
Standard Paper: I write most seed phrases down on paper is because it is easy to destroy when I am finished. I use standard graph paper for seed phrases that I won’t need for very long like an experiment or for burner wallets that I am only going to use to CoinJoin. If I think I might need a seed phrase well into the future, then I will write it down on specialized paper or punch it into metal if I feel like I need to preserve that stack with that much security.
Specialized Paper: I use a Shieldfolio Stonebook (affiliate) to write down seed phrases that I would like to protect more than standard paper. I can still shred it if I need to but writing it on specialized paper that is water and tear resistant gives me just a little more security than standard paper. It’s also much less likely that my Stonebook will be thrown away or shredded than a standard piece of paper.
Metal: Once a Bitcoin wallet has enough for me to justify a large amount of security, I punch the seed words into metal. I have experimented with a number of different methods and I like different methods for different reasons.
- I like the DIY stainless steel washer method because it’s the most private and I can buy all the tools and hardware at a local hardware store.
- I like the single stainless steel plate to have all of the words on a single piece of steel at a reasonable price point.
- I like the punch grid to have all of the words in a single place and requires the least number of tools and labor. 1 hammer, 1 punch/nail, and 1 steel plate. Super simple.
- I like the QR grid square for quick air-gapped recovery of a seed phrase using my SeedSigner.
- I also really like the Vulcan onboarding card which only costs like $20 and is an excellent tool for onboarding new users into bitcoin.
I also have a dedicated article that explains the nuances between each of these metal seed phrase products so that you can make a better informed decision for storing your own seed phrase.
Storing My Seed Phrases
Since I buy some KYC bitcoin, it’s only a matter of time before my address and other personal information is compromised due to poor security practices by the KYC platforms that I have purchased KYC bitcoin from. To reduce my risk, I don’t store my seed phrase at the KYC address that I use to buy KYC bitcoin with. When my personal information is finally compromised, (Again, it’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.) I don’t want to have to worry about my sats being compromised by storing them at the same address that I used to complete KYC.
Since there’s absolutely no way I would go into any sort of detail on where I do stash my seed phrase here in this article, I will just link to the article I wrote on how to safely store your seed phrase. It doesn’t really go into detail on good hiding places. Instead I highlight some things to think about when deciding what your threat model is and some features of a good hiding place.
If I was homeless and had very little resources at my disposal, I would probably write my seed phrase down in a txt file and keep it on a USB thumb drive and use a strong BIP 39 passphrase or maybe I would find a way to stamp it into a galvanized steel plate and bury it in the ground somewhere. I have also heard that you can run Sparrow directly from a USB thumb drive without having to install it on a computer but I have not yet been able to do this.
If I was rich I would punch my seed phrase into titanium and put it in a safe that’s bolted into the foundation of my house in part of the world that was immune from catastrophic natural disasters like flooding, landslides, earthquakes with good property rights and stand-your-ground laws.
Recovering A Bitcoin Wallet
I only use a couple of hardware wallets to recover Bitcoin wallets. My personal favorite is my SeedSigner but I also use a ColdCard because I can enter my seed words directly into either device to recover a Bitcoin wallet in a completely offline air-gapped environment. I don’t have to enter anything into a keyboard or an internet connected computer. That’s an important part of keeping your seed phrase secure.
If I am only recovering a small wallet balance from a test or experiment, then I just enter it directly into my Sparrow Wallet and send the balance to a more secure wallet.
Time for a quick recap. At this point, I have purchased some sats from both private and KYC sources. I have securely generated a seed phrase and written it down on paper or steel depending on how much security I need for that wallet. Now it’s time for me to actually send some bitcoin to my wallet but a seed phrase is just a list of 12-24 words. In order to actually send bitcoin to my wallet, I need to generate a Bitcoin address to send to. In order to do that, I need a Bitcoin software wallet to generate my Bitcoin addresses, build transactions, and broadcast to the network. Discovering the right tools to do this has been one of the most important parts of my journey towards a Bitcoin standard.
Stacking sats is worthless unless I take custody of those sats and send them to my own wallet. For self custody, I use Sparrow Wallet because it is the best desktop wallet that I have ever used.
How I Self-Custody My Bitcoin
Stacking sats is an amazing feeling but it’s all a complete waste if I don’t control my own private keys. Once I have secured my seed phrase, now comes the time to self-custody those sats and send them to my own wallet. There is no single way that I self custody my sats. I have different wallets with different threat models and levels of security for different things.
I cannot stress the importance of self-custody enough. Third-party custody is NOT bitcoin. It’s just an IOU. It’s just a decree of ownership. It’s fiat. If you let a third-party custody your bitcoin, you don’t actually own anything, so don’t @ me if you get totally rekt by keeping your sats under third-party custody. If you decide to buy from KYC on-ramps, get your coins off of exchanges and into your own wallet ASAP. There is no other way. If you buy from non-KYC services, chances are that you receive payment directly to your wallet. To HODL means that you control your own private keys. It’s that simple.
Keeping your coins on an exchange is also the driving force behind Bitcoin price suppression. When you withdraw bitcoin to your own wallet, you are helping support the price of bitcoin by combating fractional reserve Bitcoin banking practices.
Creating Transactions: Sparrow Wallet
In order to send bitcoin from one address to another, I need to create, sign, and broadcast a Bitcoin transaction. That requires Bitcoin wallet software to build the transaction, private keys to sign the transaction, and then I broadcast to a Bitcoin node who relays it to other nodes in the network.
For many Bitcoin users, all 3 of these are typically on the same device like a mobile or desktop wallet with a backup written down on a piece of paper. Since I am focused on building a Bitcoin standard for myself and others, I want the highest level of security combined with the highest level of functionality. To achieve this, I keep all 3 of these functions separate and use them in an air-gapped manner.
Private Keys: My seed phrase (private keys) are completely air-gapped and stamped into metal.
Signing Device: To sign transactions, I currently use either my SeedSigner or a ColdCard completely offline and air-gapped.
Wallet Software: In order to build transactions, I use Sparrow Wallet to build my transactions and then relay them to my SeedSigner via a partially signed Bitcoin transaction (PSBT) where I verify and sign the transaction before I send it back to Sparrow wallet to be broadcast to my node.
This setup gives me the highest level of security with relatively easy access. Relaying transactions between Sparrow Wallet and my SeedSigner via QR codes is the easiest way that I have found to completely air-gap my private keys while also making it easy enough for me to actually build, sign, and broadcast transactions. If the receiving wallet supports PayJoin, the transaction will also use PayJoin which helps to increase privacy for both me and the recipient.
Hot Wallets: CoinJoin
Since I do whatever I can to practice good privacy with my bitcoin, I use a single hot wallet to CoinJoin. With Sparrow wallet, I can CoinJoin (using Whirlpool) as long as I see fit and then automatically send to another wallet after a predetermined number of mixes. To keep things simple and manageable, I only ever have a few UTXOs in the whirlpool and have them automatically mix to my long term savings wallet after a while.
If you’re using CoinJoin, you need to run your own Bitcoin node to preserve your own privacy.
Cold Wallets: Long Term Savings
Bitcoin is best used as a long-term savings. All of the bitcoin that I am saving for years down the road is sent to a hardware wallet that is fully air-gapped and my seed phrase stored at a secure off-site location. My bitcoin will stay here for probably at least a decade until I decide to buy something big like a piece of land or a house or a passport in a foreign jurisdiction.
Since I have both a SeedSigner and a ColdCard, I may decide to use my ColdCard as a sort of short term savings and send a few UTXOs to for smaller purchases. Since it’s kind of a hassle to move a micro SD card between my ColdCard and my computer, I would consider plugging my ColdCard directly into my computer to send smaller amounts of bitcoin.
How I Run My Own Node + Electrum Server
To preserve my privacy, I run my own full Bitcoin node and electrum server. I don’t have to ask any third-party servers to verify my address balances and UTXOs. I connect my Sparrow Wallet directly to my own node to update address balances and broadcast transactions. I don’t leak any of my own wallet info to random nodes on the internet that might be chain analysis honeypots.
With my setup, I unequivocally OWN my bitcoin. I don’t trust anyone else to custody my bitcoin. I don’t trust anyone to tell me the balance of my addresses. I know which addresses belong to me and what their balances are and I only have $200 of computer hardware running in my closet to verify that. It’s a great feeling.
There are multiple node services that make running a node incredibly easy but for running the most basic Bitcoin node just to verify my own address balances and run an Electrum server I prefer Umbrel because I can run Robosats on it as well. For more control, I use MyNode since it gives me easy access to the command line and I think that’s a great way to learn how to interact directly with the bitcoin on a more technical level. If you’d prefer a completely FOSS node, Citadel and Ronin Dojo are excellent choices.
As soon as I can get my hands on some new free open source hardware that is being developed, I will be running a Citadel node on a BitPiRat but that is the topic of another article entirely.
How I Practice Good Privacy
Bitcoin privacy is on a spectrum but if you are vigilant and careful how you use your bitcoin, you can use bitcoin anonymously. Practicing good Bitcoin privacy is not something that happens all at once and there is no single step that you need to be more careful than others. You need to be sure that you are doing all that you can all of the time to ensure that you are maximizing your privacy when you use bitcoin.
- I accept bitcoin as payment both on-chain and on lightning. This is the best way to stack sats.
- I buy bitcoin privately and peer-to-peer whenever, wherever and however I can.
- I generate my seed phrase completely offline so that I can be sure that nobody but me knows about my Bitcoin wallet.
- I run my own Bitcoin node so that I don’t have to trust anyone else to tell me what my address balances are.
- I CoinJoin and use Coin Control to manually select each UTXO when I build transactions.
All of these things need to be done a certain way to protect and preserve the highest levels of privacy when using bitcoin. There’s a certain network effect when it comes to Bitcoin privacy. As more and more of us put these methods into practice, the more privacy we all have as a network.
Never Gonna Sell To A KYC Off-Ramp
Buying bitcoin from a KYC exchange is already bad for bitcoin because it creates a surveillance network and social transaction graph. It is absolutely an attack on bitcoin and one of the absolute worst things for the privacy of every Bitcoin user. Since I understand that bitcoin is a journey, not everyone is going to be stacking their first sats from a decentralized exchange or off-grid mining with curtailed solar energy in some remote corner of the world. The average user is going to buy their first fraction of a bitcoin from a centralized Bitcoin exchange that requires you to surrender all of your personal information.
Buying from one of these KYC honeypots is bad but sending bitcoin TO one of these KYC honeypots is even worse. Selling your KYC’d sats back to a KYC off-ramp isn’t that big of a deal because you’re not adding much data to the transaction surveillance graph. If you ever receive private sats from someone or you buy from a decentralized exchange that doesn’t collect any of your personal info, I would consider it an attack on bitcoin to send them to a KYC off-ramp.
I will say this again for the people in the back. Sending private sats to a KYC off-ramp is one of the absolute worst things you can do for your own privacy as well as the privacy network of bitcoiners. Please avoid this at all costs.
As soon as you own some bitcoin, do all that you can to avoid sending them to a KYC off-ramp. Even if you have KYC sats, it is better to spend them as money to grow the circular economy and help someone else stack private sats.
I am a one-way valve from fiat into bitcoin. I only buy and I have no intention of selling back to fiat to “make money”. There is a small chance that I find a decent way to stack sats without any KYC in which case I will slowly sell every single one of my KYC sats back to a KYC exchange to slowly swap them for non-KYC sats.
I will never send private sats to a KYC off-ramp. That’s probably the worst thing that I could possibly do.
Growing The Circular Economy
While bitcoin is the best savings mechanism in history, the end goal is not to just buy and hodl forever. The end goal is to use bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash and that means spending bitcoin as money out in the real world. One of the final ways that I am building a Bitcoin standard is by growing the Bitcoin circular economy within my own community and circle of influence.
Growing the circular economy is an uphill battle because you can’t make people want bitcoin until they understand that their current system is working against them. Luckily, an increasing number of individuals are waking up the the harsh reality that inflation is real and they need a money that cannot be printed at the whims of politicians and bankers. First, they have to understand that they have a problem and that bitcoin fixes it. Unfortunately, most will not realize they have a problem until it’s too late.
Since I can’t help everyone, here is what I am actively doing to grow the circular economy with the ones that I can help.
- Accept bitcoin as payment for goods and services. Again, this is the best way to stack sats.
- Don’t sell bitcoin to exchanges. Spend it with merchants.
- Help merchants accept bitcoin with self-custody services like Voltage, BTCPay Server, and other non-KYC tools.
- Helping other users to better understand how to use bitcoin effectively with the quality tools mentioned in this article.
- Run a lightning node to support lightning payments.
- Use SatsCard and OpenDime for pseudo-anonymous peer-to-peer payments in your local community.
- Spend bitcoin with other plebs when possible to get bitcoin circulating within your circle of influence.
- Use services like The Bitcoin Company, BitRefill, Fold, and others to buy gift cards privately for making everyday purchases.
Getting people to make these decisions can be difficult but if we truly want to see more widespread use of bitcoin, we need to start within our own local network of influence.
Orange Pilling My Friends, Family, & Beyond
The final step towards building a bitcoin standard within my own life is to orange pill anyone who is interested in bitcoin. This includes friends, family, people looking for help at meetups, new users on reddit, Uber drivers who ask what I do for work, and anyone else who is legitimately curious about bitcoin. I don’t waste my energy trying to orange pill the haters, skeptics, and devout anti-bitcoiners. They only steal passion and energy from me and give me nothing in return.
As Satoshi once said, “If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.” I have decided to focus my energy on the ones who are actively trying to understand bitcoin.
Since most people are interested in learning about bitcoin when the price is going up compared to when the price is dumping or stable, I have found that it is best to focus on building and producing new content to educate new users is the best thing to do. The entire purpose of this website is to help teach people about what bitcoin is and how to apply it in their own lives.
In my experience, the best way to orange pill people is to just buy, HODL, and patiently wait for “number go up“. If enough people are actively building a Bitcoin standard in their own lives, then it is only a matter of time until we achieve global hyperbitcoinization.
For most people, it will take years before they realize they need bitcoin. That’s fine. I let them learn at their own pace and am sure to help anyone who is actively interested in learning about bitcoin and how to use it. While I am supporting those new users with educational content, I make sure that I keep stacking sats, moving those sats to my own wallet, and continue educating the users who are ready to learn about bitcoin now.
To keep the orange pill momentum going, just be sure that you are stacking sats and move them to your own wallet. When the price pumps, your friends and family will all come to you with questions and you can be there ready and waiting with articles like this to direct them to all of the best tools and resources for them to avoid a lot of the common pitfalls that precoiners and newcoiners encounter. Telling them about how you are building a Bitcoin standard will help them motivate them to take action and follow in your footsteps.
- I regularly attend meetups to help newer users learn more about bitcoin use the best tools available.
- I produce content like this article (and other content on this site) as often as I can.
- I refer people to the best Bitcoin books.
- I help newer users asking questions on various subreddits, twitter, Quora, and any other social media sites.
As long as enough of us keep stacking sats and moving them to our own wallets and not storing them on the exchanges that are actively suppressing the price, then we will continue to support the price of bitcoin until we achieve hyperbitcoinization.
Building My Own Bitcoin Standard
With my setup, I am part of the intolerant minority that is building a Bitcoin standard and taking all of the necessary steps towards hyperbitcoinization.
- I stacks sats as privately as possible and use KYC methods to fill in the gaps.
- I generate all of the entropy for my seed phrases completely offline by randomly selecting each word (using Seed Sticks) and generate the 24th word as a checksum on my completely air-gapped hardware device (SeedSigner).
- I stamp my seed words into metal and have them stored in a secure off-site location.
- I send all of my bitcoin to my own wallet as soon and often as I am able.
- I run my own node + electrum server with Sparrow wallet to create transactions, verify address balances, and sign transactions with my completely air-gapped hardware wallet signing device (SeedSigner).
- I practice good privacy with CoinJoin, coin control, and wallet sanitization.
- I will NEVER send private sats to a KYC off-ramp because that is an attack on bitcoin. Also, I WILL NEVER SEND PRIVATE SATS TO A KYC OFF-RAMP BECAUSE THAT IS AN ATTACK ON BITCOIN!
- I am actively working to grow the circular economy in my own network of influence by onboarding others to all of the best tools available.
- I orange pill my friends and family by doing everything that I can to produce quality content and drive them to all of the best bitcoin content and resources available.
I understand that you are not in the exact same position in life that I am and you almost definitely don’t suffer from the same level of conviction that I do. All of these steps took me a long time, effort, trial and error to discover the tools and methods that I have mentioned in this article.
Hopefully this post helps you to better understand not only how I use bitcoin but why I use the tools that I do. I hope that they help you on your own personal journey towards a building a bitcoin standard as much as they have helped me.
Stay the course, plebs. We are winning.
Thank You For Reading
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