Paranoid crypto tips and random opsec thoughts

mybodyisasewer

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It has become painfully clear to me that a lot of new people here are way out of their depth and have no concept of opsec. So I'm writing this schizo post.

I was around for SR1.0 RCs (take my username literally) so the fact that I'm not incarcerated should tell you that I know what I'm doing.

I see so many people buy their bitcoin on some clearnet KYC exchange like Coinbase, and send it straight to the vendor. This is insanity. The blockchain is open, your BTC address isn't a secret, and if the vendor's address is ever discovered, you are permanently and forever linked to them.

Tons of people have lost their crypto accounts for sending funds to gambling sites, peptide sites, foriegn governments, donating to the wrong cause, and whatever else they disapprove of. Would you write a check to your drug dealer? Don't do this.

Make a Kraken account, buy XMR, send that to a non-custodial wallet, such as Cake Wallet. Cake will allow you to exchange the XMR for BTC. Whose BTC are you getting? Doesn't matter, you're paying a sketchy foreign agent, it's for the best. Decentralized exchanges are the best tool available for destroying the forensic trail between you and the vendor.

If you have trouble using Kraken as an onramp, use any exchage of your choice to get crypto and transfer it to Kraken to get the XMR. Kraken is the only exchange I know of that supports this currency, as there is a lot of pressure to delist XMR because of what I'm about to explain.

XMR has not been cracked. Despite the FUD, the US government's bounty on XMR was never claimed. This breaks the traceable chain from your custodial clearnet funds to BTC that has never touched anything with your name on it.

Obviously, vendors should be taking XMR directly, but they haven't quite caught up to the DNMs, which typically REQUIRE payment in XMR. So we're just using it to create a forensic gap between you and the funds that reach the vendor. And if you think XMR is for criminals, fine, but I've seen a $20 treasury note do things you wouldn't believe, so let's try to have consistent standards.

If you are worried about the security of running your own wallet with a seed phrase and everything, do not keep any more money in there than you need for a single purchase.

However, it is beneficial to get your crypto off the exchnage as fast as possible. This gives you plausible deniability if they ever come at you for capital gains. You can say you sold immediately at the buy price, leaving them to prove how long you held the asset. If you do this right, they won't. Also we want to keep our taxes as simple as possible. Bringing your 1099-B to H&R Block so they can work out your pittance of capital gains tax is just rude and pointless. They will hate you for this and it will cost you extra for the return prep.

Use a VPN for everything. Obviously the exchange has KYC on you, but don't give them anything more than that. Broadcasting a transaction from your personal IP address is an unnecessary risk. You want your IP associated with as little as possible. Proton VPN and PIA are solid choices if you wanted a lead on that. They don't log, and their data has yet to be seen in any unsealed warrants.

Also, rememeber the basics. Use a password for your phone, not a pin, not biometric. Do not tell people you have crypto, they will immediately and correctly assume you are a criminal. Never unlock your phone for law enforcement. Cellebrite and Graykey do not work as well as advertised. I have been in a position to see a large enough sample size and that's all I'm saying.

Ideally, you wouldn't even use a phone for this, but a laptop running a linux live distro like TAILS. This depends on your risk tolerance and threat models.

Read off the addresses when you send. Just the first and last characters. A popular cyber attack is to compromise the clipboard and have you paste the attacker's receiving address when you send.

To recap:
Kraken XMR -> Cake wallet -> swap to BTC
Use a VPN.

Write down your seed somewhere, or don't, it's just a temporary parking spot for your next purchase, right?

Stop screwing around with solana and usdt and paypal and all that noise. It is horrifying to see people buying this stuff using an American KYC service. This is how you get blacklisted from paypal. Stripe, Square, Venmo, Cashapp and all these other services are NOT YOUR FRIEND and they will snitch you out and close your account at the first sign of anything illegitimate. These financial institutions are so heavily regulated that they are essentially organs of the very state that is oppressing us. Stop trusting them!

Always assume your that exchange, bank, postman, and dentist are conspiring to build a case on you. Give them nothing to work with, get your coins off the exchange and swap them that same day. Say nothing to anyone. And if you are ever cornered for any reason, remember the magic words: I want a lawyer.

You never know when permissible actions today will come back at you in the future, ex post facto is not the shield you might think it is. If you want more info, look up the DNM bible. I'll certainly answer questions here or defend my position if someone else has a different doctrine.

Security doesn't have to be onerous or difficult, but there's a lot to learn if you're going to do it right.
 
What if I just buy the coins from Coinbase then send them directly to the vendor wallet? That seems much more straightforward.

Back in my day we bought from LocalBitcoins and sent it straight to the vendor on Dream Market. Damn government trying to make me learn XMR.
 
Yes that would be much more straightforward, but please let me explain the risk with a hypothetical situation that isn't really that hypothetical:

You make a coinbase account -> they know who you are, they know everything about you.

You buy x amount of BTC on coinbase -> they have the keys, they know their address, they just have an internal coupon for you saying you own x BTC.

You get the vendor's BTC receiving address -> You send the coins from your Coinbase account to the vendor

Coinbase now knows the vendor's address, they just don't know it's a vendor.

6 months later, the DEA and the IRS catch a US based account, warehouse, employee, server, or something else that leads them to look closer at the vendor.

Your stupid vendor has been using the same BTC receiving address for every customer. (That's why they ask for the confirmation code, because the address isn't unique to you)

The investigators can now just use any blockchain explorer to see all the addresses which sent BTC to the vendors reception address.

This is why WikiL**ks generates a new unique BTC receiving address for every donation, because they wanted donors to feel confident that they were anonymous. In my experience, peptide vendors aren't doing this.

These investigators have a (shockingly short) list of hot wallets used by US exchanges. They only need to reference that list against the vendor's customers, because the BTC blockchain is transparent. One of them is a known Coinbase wallet.

They go to Coinbase, and every other exchange, with the vendor's receiving address. They say, "Hey this was a drug dealer, just thought you should know."

Coinbase knows exactly who sent bitcoin there. Your account is immediately terminated for violating the TOS. You lose any funds that were on there. There is very little recourse.

This isn't even a worst case scenario. At least the government isn't charging you. What you did isn't exactly a crime. Yet.

This sloppiness is going to hurt people eventually and the grey market needs to prepare for the tone shift that's coming.

It is not hard to swap crypto. Heck, even just doing LTC to BTC is better than nothing. No excuse for not learning this in 2026.
 
This might be a stupid question, but I've never dealt with crypto in my life, so my issue is - Kraken wants a lot of information from me (like my ID and my proof of residency?) which seems unsafe (in the way that I'm not anonymous which I'm trying to be).

Is there any way to get around that or do I just have to give them all that data? Or any other sites that don't request so much?

Thanks in advance
 
Yes that would be much more straightforward, but please let me explain the risk with a hypothetical situation that isn't really that hypothetical:

You make a coinbase account -> they know who you are, they know everything about you.

You buy x amount of BTC on coinbase -> they have the keys, they know their address, they just have an internal coupon for you saying you own x BTC.

You get the vendor's BTC receiving address -> You send the coins from your Coinbase account to the vendor

Coinbase now knows the vendor's address, they just don't know it's a vendor.

6 months later, the DEA and the IRS catch a US based account, warehouse, employee, server, or something else that leads them to look closer at the vendor.

Your stupid vendor has been using the same BTC receiving address for every customer. (That's why they ask for the confirmation code, because the address isn't unique to you)

The investigators can now just use any blockchain explorer to see all the addresses which sent BTC to the vendors reception address.

This is why WikiL**ks generates a new unique BTC receiving address for every donation, because they wanted donors to feel confident that they were anonymous. In my experience, peptide vendors aren't doing this.

These investigators have a (shockingly short) list of hot wallets used by US exchanges. They only need to reference that list against the vendor's customers, because the BTC blockchain is transparent. One of them is a known Coinbase wallet.

They go to Coinbase, and every other exchange, with the vendor's receiving address. They say, "Hey this was a drug dealer, just thought you should know."

Coinbase knows exactly who sent bitcoin there. Your account is immediately terminated for violating the TOS. You lose any funds that were on there. There is very little recourse.

This isn't even a worst case scenario. At least the government isn't charging you. What you did isn't exactly a crime. Yet.

This sloppiness is going to hurt people eventually and the grey market needs to prepare for the tone shift that's coming.

It is not hard to swap crypto. Heck, even just doing LTC to BTC is better than nothing. No excuse for not learning this in 2026.
Would usdt-sol -> xmr -> usdt-sol from and to the same non-custodial wallet before sending to vendor help preserve privacy?
 
Yeah, so long as you have generated a new usdt-sol receiving address to take your freshly swapped funds.

The same seed phrase/wallet can generate effectively infinite receiving addresses that cannot be linked to each other, so long as they never make on-chain transfers that loop back to each other.

So yes, that will work as long as you follow common sense.
 
This might be a stupid question, but I've never dealt with crypto in my life, so my issue is - Kraken wants a lot of information from me (like my ID and my proof of residency?) which seems unsafe (in the way that I'm not anonymous which I'm trying to be).

Is there any way to get around that or do I just have to give them all that data? Or any other sites that don't request so much?

Thanks in advance


Not a stupid question!

This difficulty you are facing is called the onramp. At some point, your cash (USD I assume, if American) needs to turn into crypto. Every company that facilitates these transactions is either a bank or money service which MUST follow KYC (know your customer) laws which I believe spawned from federal anti-money laundering statutes passed by congress.

I absolutely understand your reluctance to attach your entire identity to the funds which will eventually be used to buy RCs from a foreign country.

However, finding a non-KYC onramp can be difficult, risky, and onerous. This is where risk tolerance and mitigation come into play.

My doctrine here accepts that the onramp will know you and how much of what crypto you bought, and they'll know the address to withdraw it to. The whole point of the currency swap is to deprive them of any useful data after that.

Kraken doesn't know which swapping service you used, they don't know whose XMR you ended up with. They'll never see the backend of that XMR swap to your desired spending currency. They know you, but they have no idea where the funds went, as all they can see is it getting split up into a bunch of other random wallets that aren't yours.

Unfortunately unless you find a live person willing to exchange cryto for cash in person, you're going to need a KYC onramp. Remember, the root of this problem is that you were paid in USD in the first place, and depending on how you look at it, it is your employer's fault for paying you with such a highly regulated currency. Ask them to pay you in crypto or you will find a job that does. (Don't actually do this)
 
what about exodus wallet? I transfer from coinbase there? and pay from exodus.
 
what about exodus wallet? I transfer from coinbase there? and pay from exodus.
The advice at the top is good opsec and using a mixer (and/or multiple wallets) is an added level of security and deniability. It is, however, also time consuming and costly in fees. Realistically, unless you're shipping lost of aichgeeaich, and they can show it, these peps aren't heavily "controlled". I'd never send anything direct from a KYC, mostly because they'll ban you and take your crypto (seen it happen more than once). If you use the account for ANYTHING else, that's are big PITA. However, the KYC crypto banks also just want some deniability so, if you go through a custodial wallet (like Exodus) that's enough they can say, "we didn't transfer any funds to the addresses on that list ossifer".

Could the feds still come after you? Sure. By that time they'll be building a case and will probably find something to pin on you anyway.
 
Yeah. Plus XMR is volatile. I love a "private by default" chain, but if you're truly optimizing for all payments and not just onion ones, then you need a stable coin. (And sure, I guess I could run it into monero and right back out to use it as kind of a coin washer, but, as @joseblo points out above, what a PITA.)
 
One other question (not rly related to crypto but to security in general), should you use your actual name when providing the shipping address or not (for security reasons)?
 
One other question (not rly related to crypto but to security in general), should you use your actual name when providing the shipping address or not (for security reasons)?
That doesn't matter much if YOU actually live there.
 
What a nice piece of "writing for web"; it was written in plain speech, easy to scan, even the technical stuff that wasn't spelled out was easy to figure out from context, the tone was neutral but not unfriendly, and if I didn't know before why I ought not buy PYUSD and send it to a vendor, this would have made it clear and obvious to me.
 
Still learning, so may be a bit misguided, but here goes:

If my "risk level" is OK with buying stablecoin (usdt, pyusd, etc.) by way of PayPal, then transferring/converting that stablecoin in Exodus, then paying from Exodus, am I taking too big of a risk? Am I on my way to needing one of you to stuff your rectum with Tirz vials when coming to visit me?

Exodus wallet will only be used for research purchases (coin in coin out), not storing/investing/keeping crypto currency. NOTE - I have not done this yet, I'm still reading/learning.

This is my plan as I move away from Telehealth (503b,a) access (reading the tea leaves here so to speak).

I feel like many people do it this way.
 
Still learning, so may be a bit misguided, but here goes:

If my "risk level" is OK with buying stablecoin (usdt, pyusd, etc.) by way of PayPal, then transferring/converting that stablecoin in Exodus, then paying from Exodus, am I taking too big of a risk? Am I on my way to needing one of you to stuff your rectum with Tirz vials when coming to visit me?

Exodus wallet will only be used for research purchases (coin in coin out), not storing/investing/keeping crypto currency. NOTE - I have not done this yet, I'm still reading/learning.

This is my plan as I move away from Telehealth (503b,a) access (reading the tea leaves here so to speak).

I feel like many people do it this way.
That is a heck of a lot better than nothing. The vast majority of people who get banned are low hanging fruit - meaning there's a direct blockchain transaction between your custodial wallet and the "bad guy."

By simply adding a separate transaction step, you can at least plausibly say you paid someone else and they must have done it. Again, this comes back to the threat model. What are you afraid of? If you just don't want to get banned by coinbase, having that intermediate step will probably save you. However, no one who looks closely at it will be genuinely fooled.
 
Is there any advantage to using a hardware wallet for the "middleman" transaction step, rather than using Exodus?
 
Is there any advantage to using a hardware wallet for the "middleman" transaction step, rather than using Exodus?


Hardware wallets are very difficult to hack, and if you think that you are a potential target for organized/state level threats, a hardware wallet might be a good idea. Anything over 3 or 4k I'd say should be kept offline. There's a lot of discussion on this, I'd probably look at reddit 🤢 honestly.

As far as making the transaction less traceable, no, the hardware wallet doesnt change how transactions are recorded in the blockchain.
 
Super late to the discussion, but I really appreciate this thread.

I am not a crypto user (yet) but I do know a few things about opsecs...and I saw A LOT of people using coinbase or paypal to buy cryptos. That completely defeats the purpose of security!
 
I've never bought crypto and am just learning about it now but one thing I wanted to point out, in as strong a terms as I possibly can - never, and I do mean NEVER, expect Paypal to have your best interests at heart. They will steal your money and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Paypal is NOT a bank and they have absolutely no obligation to safeguard your funds. Do not leave any money, or crypto, in your Paypal account that you are not willing to forfeit.

I am speaking from hard earned experience on this one.
 
what do you think about those crypto vending machines.

They have a couple by me I was think about buying btc onto my Coinbase wallet then transfer to my trust wallet then the vendor.

I was hoping to avoid buying btc from an account linked to my Bank
 
Unfortunately unless you find a live person willing to exchange cryto for cash in person, you're going to need a KYC onramp.

For someone going from not doing any crypto at all to using this approach, what would be the best wallet(s) / currencies to use and what should one be aware of? I have people offer to pay me in crypto all the time and I always decline, but if it would be an easy onramp to grey, I would reconsider. Feel free to PM if not appropriate for public posts.
 
what do you think about those crypto vending machines.

They have a couple by me I was think about buying btc onto my Coinbase wallet then transfer to my trust wallet then the vendor.

I was hoping to avoid buying btc from an account linked to my Bank

They're still KYC. They will want your ID.
For someone going from not doing any crypto at all to using this approach, what would be the best wallet(s) / currencies to use and what should one be aware of? I have people offer to pay me in crypto all the time and I always decline, but if it would be an easy onramp to grey, I would reconsider. Feel free to PM if not appropriate for public posts.
Honestly I have never collected large amounts of crypto or from various people for payment purposes, only sigle buyers. I would still use Cake. But if you are running a business and invoicing and all that jazz you might want some commercial sofware to manage that.

I've never bought crypto and am just learning about it now but one thing I wanted to point out, in as strong a terms as I possibly can - never, and I do mean NEVER, expect Paypal to have your best interests at heart. They will steal your money and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Paypal is NOT a bank and they have absolutely no obligation to safeguard your funds. Do not leave any money, or crypto, in your Paypal account that you are not willing to forfeit.

I am speaking from hard earned experience on this one.

Even USD normies understand how evil Paypal is. 🤣 The future is looking brighter.
 
They're still KYC. They will want your ID.

Honestly I have never collected large amounts of crypto or from various people for payment purposes, only sigle buyers. I would still use Cake. But if you are running a business and invoicing and all that jazz you might want some commercial sofware to manage that.



Even USD normies understand how evil Paypal is. 🤣 The future is looking brighter.
Gone are the good ol' days of money laundering
 
Even USD normies understand how evil Paypal is. 🤣 The future is looking brighter.
Oh I'm a old school privacy and internet head. I've just steered away from crypto as I had no use for it. Now, I do, so I unfortunately need to figure it out.

Speaking of privacy, do you think there's any use for Proton Wallet? I get it with my suite subscription.
 
What if I just buy the coins from Coinbase then send them directly to the vendor wallet? That seems much more straightforward.

Back in my day we bought from LocalBitcoins and sent it straight to the vendor on Dream Market. Damn government trying to make me learn XMR.
Its a much more straightforward way to have your account suspended. CB and other large platforms have broad analytics and pattern analysis that attempt to detect and suspend accounts purchasing from grey market sources

What OP described makes the crypto untracable.

if that is too much effort, have your own wallet on your pc and just transfer from the exchange into your own wallet and pay that using the PC wallet
 
Oh I'm a old school privacy and internet head. I've just steered away from crypto as I had no use for it. Now, I do, so I unfortunately need to figure it out.

Speaking of privacy, do you think there's any use for Proton Wallet? I get it with my suite subscription.
I've never used it, but I use proton for email and vpn and I have faith in their products.
 

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