A Comprehensive Guide to Buying Bitcoin Without Leaving a Trace

The modern age of cryptocurrency is one marred with no shortage of irony and confusion. As people rush in a mad-scramble to a newborn system of finance without fully comprehending its deeper intricacies, motivated by impressive growth and mass adoption from their peers and public figures alike, the majority of the major advantages of cryptocurrency are rendered less effective or are muted altogether.

For a decentralized currency, one relies on no figure of authority to give legitimacy to the value of a token  -- so naturally, whenever some billionaire says something wacky on their verified twitter account, the price of Dogecoin skyrockets. For a cryptocurrency as a distributed LEDGER currency, one depends only on volunteer processes on a network rather than on a centralized banking system to verify transactions -- which provides an entirely reasonable explanation as to why so much currency is held by  centralized exchanges. And, of course, for cryptocurrency as a private endeavor, one in which anybody can make transactions without the verification of a governing body -- it seems perfectly reasonable that exchanges demand your full name, address, ID number, social security number, and a short video of your saying the word 'extortion' while moving your head from left to right, all before they'll permit you to withdraw your funds to a cold wallet.

Go to any cryptocurrency community and check out what the most popular content is. I dare you, take a look for yourself. No matter where you go, I guarantee, sitting cozy right alongside the most popular posts, you will find endless rants criticizing centralized exchanges. People will be railing on Coinbase, complaining about its impossible withdraw fees. Or users will complain about how they can't talk to a representative about their massive fortune that slipped through the cracks when transitioning wallets on Kraken.

And yet at the exact same time, countless newcomers are rushing to centralized exchanges or leasing systems. COINBASE is going public, Venmo and Paypal now allow you to spend money on cryptocurrency without owning it, and several major financial systems such as Fidelity are rushing to get knee deep in crypto.

How Did We Get Here?

For practically all of human existence, your everyday consumer has lived, eaten, and breathed in a world of centralized finance. Be it a king or a dictator or a president or senate of representatives, it mattered not; all shared the common trait of recognizing a singular national currency as the valid form of exchange within their dominion. It's insane to consider that up until about a decade ago, there existed no alternative medium of exchange besides accepting whatever your local jurisdiction decided was fair. Shedding this antiquated mindset -- particularly when the applicability of decentralized finance is still developing its footing -- is not a transition that happens overnight.

Whenever humanity is faced with the daunting prospect of the unknown future, our first inclination is usually to ascribe upon it the attributes of what we're already familiar with. I personally have a lot of fun looking back at old pictures from centuries prior that depicted what the future might have looked like to artists of the era. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, the stories of H.G. Wells all serve as great examples. A favorite series of mine is "An L'an 2000", credited to an illustrator going by Villemard. It's a series of postcards made in the late 1800's and early 1900's that attempt to predict the scenery one might expect to see in our modern age of living -- and like its German counterpart series, most of it is wildly off the mark. Some of it's pretty accurate, if one is willing to stretch their imagination a little bit. But there's no denying the 19th century influence of the illustrations. It's impossible to ignore that when Villemard was painting his scenery, he was apply the fashion, qualities, and characteristics from his own age to every brushstroke.

(Yes, we eventually got Helicopters, Skype and procedurally-generated soundtracks. Postman's uniform's looking a little different, however.)

While it might strike one as being kinda goofy, it shouldn't come as anybody's surprise that the very first thing we do as a species when encountering  decentralized finance is default to trying to centralizing it. Nobody's immune to it. Even when I talk about distributed ledger systems, I often revert to forming an antiquated analogy -- akin to a cheque system -- in order to comprehend blockchain systems. Had I been born into a world where cryptocurrency was the dominant medium of exchange, I might understand it a little better. A four year old with an ipad will always understand its intricate details far better than a forty year old Frenchman brought from the 1890's ever will, no matter how much time he spends scrolling through apps.

And yet, if cryptocurrency's short history is any indicator, it's most certainly not disappearing altogether any time soon. Cryptocurrency is not the fabrication of some mortal nation or empire, like the Soviet ruble. It lacks these intrinsic limitations because, as an open source conceptualization, it transcends national borders, term lengths, and dynasty eras. The genie is out of the bottle: anybody can make a cryptocurrency, and the accepted metric for its value is not determined by any national entity, but by the mass of people who accept it.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Sooner or later, the cryptocurrency market will be faced with the inevitable need to ascend above the influence of the monolithic governing bodies we're familiar with today. Already, in places where inflation and volatility are major problems like Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria, cryptocurrencies are gaining a foothold as a replacement over failing national currencies. And while this may be an appealing substitute to the citizens of these nations by addressing conventional shortcomings of state-issued currency, there's simply no effective way for a government to regulate or control these transactions.

Here in America, the uncomfortable question of the federal government's role in cryptocurrency is being placed on the table for everybody's consideration. I, for one, intend to spend my days sitting back with a bucket of popcorn, laughing at the endless circles our senators will doubtless find themselves running around in. Much the same way the feds cannot force Apple to do the impossible for an encrypted iphone, there exists no way for any central authority to govern the mathematics behind encrypted currency transactions -- provided the appropriate protocols are followed, and the necessary infrastructure is cemented, it is simple mathematical impossibility.

Perhaps it'd be helpful to walk through a hypothetical scenario to better illustrate a possible future -- or present, in some places -- for cryptocurrency. Picture the following: suppose you resided in a nation where your governing body decided that it didn't approve of transactions made with cryptocurrency. Perhaps they were exorbitantly taxed, or made altogether illegal.

You could have any reason to want to exchange your national currency for cryptocurrency. Maybe you're looking to use it as a transitional currency, so that when the day comes that you successfully emigrate to greener pastures, you can exchange it back to the banknotes of your new homeland. Or maybe you're looking to use it as a medium of exchange for goods or services rendered prohibited by your government -- books, films, music, weapons, drugs, or even just foreign goods for which your own nation has imposed prohibitive tariffs. Maybe you just like the coin, and you want to reserve your right to be able to exercise your freedom of expenditure.

The question stands: how does one go about exchanging their currency for cryptocurrency without another soul knowing?

Allow me to introduce to you my two favorite tools for just such an occasion: TailsOS and Bisq.

• Part 1: Installing TailsOS

TailsOS is an odd miracle of an operating system, with roots firmly cemented in the paranoid creations of Linux distributions of ages prior, such as the fabled Tinfoil Hat Linux. It's not remarkable in its faculties -- it is by no means a high-end system. I think it's helpful to consider it a purposed application. With a copy of TailsOS and a little bit of know-how, it is possible to perform any function expected from a desktop computer without leaving a trace.

Tails has an array of approaches it employs to help make user activity untraceable. By default, Tails is an amnesic operating system -- any user activity is wiped entirely from the system upon shutdown. Even the RAM is scrubbed before turning off, leaving absolutely no trace, unless the user specifically allocates an encrypted persistent storage system. Furthermore, all internet activity is performed solely through TOR, ensuring that no part of your system ever comes in contact with with anything that hasn't been passed through several layers of onion router encryption. In short, Tails is the closest you can get to using a brand new computer in a random country for whatever Bitcoin transaction you wish -- and then some.

For you see, TailsOS is also a remarkably compact operating system -- the image can be flashed onto any drive 8gb or larger, making it useful as a portable system. It runs on virtually any 64-bit hardware, allowing the user to simply plug a USB stick into a computer, remove the primary hard drive, and boot the system natively. Additionally, Tails allows users to quickly copy the ISO image to another drive. For our hypothetical totalitarian scenario, you would only need a flash drive, a working computer, and a trusted friend with a copy of TailsOS in order to access the internet completely anonymously, from what would appear to be an entirely brand-new computer to any eavesdropper.

In this scenario, our installation's quite simple: all one needs to do is load up Tails, plug in the desired drive -- preferably formatted in FAT32 in advance -- and run the "Tails Installer" application. The rest is done almost automatically.

After this process, you'll want to restart your system on the newly-created copy of Tails so that it might be configured appropriately. Some ridiculously long password will doubtless be of benefit as an administrative password, along with persistent storage for whatever other applications you might prefer.

But what if you're on the other side of the fence in this scenario? Suppose your goal would be to airdrop thousands of copies of Tails into a nation ruled by a totalitarian regime, so that the oppressed citizens could begin an underground Tails distribution network. How would you even get started with loading up the 'genesis' copy?

Fortunately, Tails is a straightforward download. It's an easy installation for Windows, Mac, or Linux from the tails project website, just so long as you have a few hours to spare for the installation process.

There is one crucial step worth addressing before you get too comfortable with your installation: make sure to verify your installation through GPG.

It's all too easy for a malicious adversary to hijack or redirect the traffic going to the tails project, misleading people into downloading compromising software. By performing a GPG handshake -- a prerequisite for Linux command line installations -- you are first ensuring that the server you're communicating with is legitimate, and second ensuring that their verification of your download is authoritative. Once again, their instructions for performing this process is lain out concisely enough. While there exist browser extensions to automate the process, I'm less inclined to trust in them.

All this said and done, you should have a functioning copy of Tails up and running! Congratulations! But our next big question: how do we marry private operating systems with decentralized exchange?

• Part 2: Installing Bisq

While Tails is a small miracle of a private operating system, Bisq is a small miracle of decentralized exchange. Unlike conventional exchanges, there is no online login. In fact, there is no user information stored on external servers at all. There are no transaction fees or withdraw fees. What sets Bisq aside from other exchanges is that it remains purely decentralized. When users load Bisq as an application, they connect with each other through onion routers and share with each other information that is only stored on their personal drives. When exchanges are made, cryptocurrencies are stored in multi-signature escrow to reinforce accountability. There's even an additional security deposit included to discourage fraud and incentivize legitimate transactions. When payments are fulfilled, the escrow is unlocked, and both members of the transaction go about their separate ways with nary a hint of their existence left for others to piece together.

Yet, despite how much Tails and Bisq have in common, it's important to remember that both are open-source applications with tangential pursuits. The primary goal of Tails is to remain wholly untraceable, which means discouraging the practice of permanently installing foreign software. While both Bisq and Tails are closely tied to and very much dependent upon TOR as a service to perform most of their functions, they both agree that providing native installation protocols between two very different programs that are both changing constantly isn't exactly a trivial endeavor.

And yet, Tails is a Debian-based Linux distribution like any other. If it's possible to load Bisq on a conventional operating system, then you bet your britches that it's possible to load it on an untraceable operating system. All it requires is patience, persistence, and a little bit of Linux technical know-how.

• Step 1: Finding and Verifying Downloads

Once you're comfortable with your Tails installation, it's time to install the necessary data. Before I began, I took the proactive step of making a special Bisq folder on my persistent storage just to keep all the installation files in one place. There will be a small handful of vitally required elements: the binary files, the verification key, and a change to what TOR will accept.

Head down to the Bisq Github repository to download the current binary file (.deb) and later on, the signing key file (.asc) to your storage. Ideally, they should be extracted to your Bisq folder.

To verify your copy of tails, right click the window where your files are extracted and open up a terminal window. In this window, type the following:

wget https://bisq.network/pubkey/29CDFD3B.asc

Where 29CDFD3B is simply the name of the key's file at this time of writing for Bisq-64bit-1.6.2.deb and should be considered a placeholder for future releases. If this command gets stubborn, use "sudo wget" to enable it.

After this, you'll want to import the key to your keychain, using gpg --import 29CDFD3B.asc . Following this, check the signature with gpg --digest-algo SHA256 --verify Bisq-64bit-1.6.2.deb{.asc*,} where again, "Bisq-64bit-1.6.2.deb" should be seen as the placeholder for whatever version the current binary is.

If you've done it correctly, you should see positive feedback verifying the download. This indicates that the file's legitimate, and it's safe to proceed with installation.

• Step 2: Installing Bisq

This step is almost too easy. Simply open a terminal window in the same folder as your binary file, and type the following:

sudo dpkg -i Bisq-64bit-1.6.2.deb

Doing so will install Bisq as a software onto Tails. If you've done this step correctly, you'll find that in the applications folder, under "other", there will be a new icon installed for Bisq. Congrats!

However, we're not out of the woods yet. Just because Bisq is installed doesn't mean its set up to receive information from the TOR network. To do that, we're going to need to configure TOR so that it accepts Bisq as an application.

• Step 3: Configuring TOR

   

  Go into the /etc/ folder from the TailsOS computer repository. Right click, open up a new terminal window, and enter the following.

  sudo chmod ugo+rwx onion-grater.d

Doing so will require your administrative password, and will also allow you to edit the files in the onion-grater.d folder. This is necessary, as we'll need to include a special case for Bisq. Open up a new text document, saved as "bisq.yml", with the following contents:

---- apparmor-profiles:    - '/opt/Bisq/Bisq'  users:    - 'amnesia'  commands:    AUTHCHALLENGE:      - 'SAFECOOKIE .*'    SETEVENTS:      - 'CIRC WARN ERR'      - 'CIRC ORCONN INFO NOTICE WARN ERR HS_DESC HS_DESC_CONTENT'    GETINFO:      - 'net/listeners/socks'    ADD_ONION:      - pattern:     'NEW:(\S+) Port=9999,(\S+)'        replacement: 'NEW:{} Port=9999,{client-address}:{}'      - pattern:     '(\S+):(\S+) Port=9999,(\S+)'        replacement: '{}:{} Port=9999,{client-address}:{}'    DEL_ONION:      - '.+'    HSFETCH:      - '.+'  events:    CIRC:      suppress: true    ORCONN:      suppress: true    INFO:      suppress: true    NOTICE:      suppress: true    WARN:      suppress: true    ERR:      suppress: true    HS_DESC:      response:        - pattern:     '650 HS_DESC CREATED (\S+) (\S+) (\S+) \S+ (.+)'          replacement: '650 HS_DESC CREATED {} {} {} redacted {}'        - pattern:     '650 HS_DESC UPLOAD (\S+) (\S+) .*'          replacement: '650 HS_DESC UPLOAD {} {} redacted redacted'        - pattern:     '650 HS_DESC UPLOADED (\S+) (\S+) .+'          replacement: '650 HS_DESC UPLOADED {} {} redacted'        - pattern:     '650 HS_DESC REQUESTED (\S+) NO_AUTH'          replacement: '650 HS_DESC REQUESTED {} NO_AUTH'        - pattern:     '650 HS_DESC REQUESTED (\S+) NO_AUTH \S+ \S+'          replacement: '650 HS_DESC REQUESTED {} NO_AUTH redacted redacted'        - pattern:     '650 HS_DESC RECEIVED (\S+) NO_AUTH \S+ \S+'          replacement: '650 HS_DESC RECEIVED {} NO_AUTH redacted redacted'        - pattern:     '.*'          replacement: ''    HS_DESC_CONTENT:      suppress: true

Once this is finished, type the following into any terminal window to refresh the grater.

sudo service onion-grater restart

Lastly, go to your computer repository again, and find the /usr/share/applications/Bisq.desktop file. You'll need permissions to change this one too, which the following administrative command can accomplish:

sudo chmod ugo+rwx Bisq.desktop

Once this is done, open the text document and replace the text resembling Exec=/opt/Bisq/Bisq with Exec=/opt/Bisq/Bisq --torControlPort 9051 --torControlCookieFile=/var/run/tor/control.authcookie --torControlUseSafeCookieAuth

It should look like this:

Close all the windows, pat yourself on the back, and breathe a sigh of relief -- you've just installed Bisq on Tails!

• Step 4: Running Bisq

Now mind you, even with a copy of Tails that has persistent storage enabled, none of these installation steps will be saved once Tails is shut down. This is especially risky with Bisq -- being a decentralized application, none of your information is stored on an external server. Logins, transactions, wallets, seeds, and especially currencies, are all at risk of being lost permanently if Tails is shut down without warning. As usual, be a responsible cryptocurrency user and always write down your seed phrase on a physical medium.

For our hypothetical underground resistance members living in a totalitarian regime scenario, I like to picture a secret Bisq transaction happening on a stagnant Tails computer. In some isolated location, with as secure a means of accessing the internet as possible, a throwaway laptop is stationed, idly processing the transactions over the course of days. Perhaps the funding is to be sent secretly as cash through the mail, in a tamper-proof envelope. Only once the cash has been received and the bitcoins moved to a cold wallet will the operating system be shutdown and the computer destroyed, leaving not a trace.

And while all of this might strike the reader as being a little extreme, do remember: following this path ensures that there is no way possible for an adversary, no matter how powerful, to intercept you or even prove that you've exchanged your fiat currency for cryptocurrency. The mathematics behind the encryption systems -- from the persistent storage, to the onion routing, to the escrow exchanges, and finally, to your personal wallet -- are all entirely unyielding. No man, no company, no government is able to crack any one link in this long chain of procedure.

Chances are, of course, that we won't be finding ourselves exchanging cryptocurrency through such a rigorous method on the daily. Even just setting ourselves up to do so is already a massive headache. If you've managed to successfully follow each of the steps above, then you should be commended for following through with something most people would find to be completely overkill.

But the marriage of Bisq with Tails is important to me. It's a reminder that -- should I really want to -- it is always possible to purchase cryptocurrency from a willing participant. No matter what kind of hardware you have, no matter where in the world you are, no matter who does and does not want you to commit to the exchange, the choice will always be yours alone. No term limit, no law, no regime can ever change the eternal nature of cryptocurrency, as the evidence before your very eyes would suggest.