I am using Exodus with a VPN.
does exodus have the ability to freeze your funds, if the see your in a state that doesnt allow it?
i am looking into a hardware wallet soon.
what is the best wallet to use that hold all tokens, and cant be frozen by the company?
Use a desktop wallet or a hardware wallet. In fact, use multiple.
Never, ever use an online wallet. They are not secure nor are they private.
Here are my recommendations from a security perspective for improving privacy/anonymity with crypto:
1. Use a good software wallet. Personally, I use exodus for most things.
2. Build yourself a virtual machine or a second profile on your computer to use Exodus from on top of your normal machine. This will allow you to have a second,
separate wallet entirely.
When you purchase crypto using your bank account or whatever from kraken or coinbase, etc., they have record of where you send your coins to. There have been instances of those services freezing people's accounts because they see the wallet that they've been sending coins to is associated with bad things (e.g., they see when you purchase crypto you send it to wallet A, then you make transactions somewhere else with wallet B or C, which is known to be associate with a darknet market or nefarious person).
For that reason, I always recommend buying your crypto, sending it to wallet A. This is your main wallet. However, anytime you go to make a transaction--whether it's for gear, or PCT drugs, or anything grey/black market you should do one of the following:
First off: your best bet is to just not fucking use bitcoin or anything like that. They are not anonymous at all, they are actually fairly easy to trace nowadays and the US and other governments are actively monitoring the blockchains of cryptos all the time. Due to this, your BEST BET, is to use something like Monero, which is not traceable due to the way they use ring signatures and hide addresses from public view. Ask your vendor for a monero address to send funds to instead of bitcoin. You can get monero totally anonymously using websites like localmonero.com and others.
If your vendor won't take monero, then personally I'd ask them why not, Monero is vastly superior to BTC, and see if there's another vendor that will. However, there is another option if your vendor just won't use monero, which will make things
harder to track.
- Instead of just going coinbase>wallet>proceed to grey-market Tx to vendor. You should never do this for the reasons mentioned above.
Do something like this instead:
- coinbase > wallet A > wallet B > proceed to grey-market Tx to vendor.
- or something like but ether on coinbase > send to wallet A > exchange for BTC or LTC > send the new currency to wallet B > then proceed with grey-market Tx to vendor.
The more hops that the transaction goes through, the harder it is to trace and unless authorities seized your equipment and found the wallets on your machine, they wouldn't be able to prove any wallet other than Wallet A belongs to you. Exchanging also makes it much harder to trace as it then jumps over to another blockchain entirely and then they'd have to figure that shit out.
Monero is the best, by far. Coinbase>Wallet A>localmonero transaction>withdraw to
Monero wallet > use Monero for Tx with vendor. But the other options are pretty good too.
As technology and compute power advances, it will only get easier for the blockchain to be traced. That's why ensuring privacy and anonymity NOW is so critical. In most cases the statute of limitations for drug possession is currently 3 years (thankfully not very long). If they tried to slap some other charges like dealing or something, the statute of limitations could then be 5-7 years. Personally, I don't think we're going to see a bunch of prosecutions in the future based off of blockchain analysis, but dealers should be wary for sure and consumers should always maintain the best possible OPSEC procedures they can.
You can find more about the statute of limitations for different states
here. Some states seem to have no statue of limitations at all even for misdemeanors!
In my opinion: bitcoin fucking sucks. The only reason it is worth what it is is because it was the first and has the name recognition. But BTC is fucking slow, it is expensive, and it is not privacy oriented at all. There are SO MANY different cryptos that are SO MUCH better for different things, but BTC is king just because it's got the recognition. Being a tech guy, it drives me insane to see this happen all the time. BTC can only handle 7 transactions per second on average and takes like 60 minutes to full confirmation. Even Ether can handle 25 TPS! BCH can handle 300 TPS! Monero is slower, but it is totally private, so the selling point isn't the speed but the anonymity. IMO Bitcoin should fucking fall down to 50 cents per coin and other cryptos should take over: Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, and more.
As a side note, I found out that ADULTERY is a crime in 18 (eighteen) states in the US and in many even a class 1 felony!!!
Edit: and also make sure you're using a good PAID VPN like NordVPN or ExpressVPN or one of the others I recommended in my privacy post that's stickied in in the other sub.
