For added opsec:
- Use a temporary email address on the order form (e.g. mailinator or similar).
- Do not ship the goods to your home address. Pick-up your order in-person at a drop-off spot, post-office, or have it delivered to your workplace.
A bit more information about hardware vs. software/app wallet:
- Hardware wallets protect your bitcoin and cryptocurrencies by keeping your private keys secure on a dedicated USB (or air-gapped) device. The private keys never leave the device.
- If you use an app on your phone or desktop computer, your private keys could be stolen by malware. This is the exact attack vector that hardware wallets are designed to protect against.
Good luck!
If you really don't want to get a dedicated hardware wallet, the poor-persons choice would be to (in order of preference):
* In case you're really just holding and won't be wanting to transact with it anytime soon, a paper wallet can work. Generate it on an airgapped device and never let the private keys touch a connected device.
* Use a dedicated boot environment. For example: Set up Tails on a USB drive and boot into it on your laptop, or make a fresh install on a raspberry pi or similar. Use Electrum (or bitcoin core qt / cli), store the wallet file only on a separate encrypted USB drive. Don't use this OS install for other things. Prefer connecting only over Tor, I2P, or cjdns.
* A reputable smartphone wallet. A downside here is that you will have to be very diligent with your system updates and have to keep a peripheral eye on if the author gets acquired or goes rouge etc. You'd have to do your own research but Bluewallet seems decent.
* Ignore all the advice and access the keys on your PC anyway. It's possible to do safely but as noted above it has increased risks and requires a lot of diligence.
One could (and should!) still use the same wallet with a self-hosted node, or a third-party one, by using the wallet with a different software (which is also officially supported; Ledger provides docs for doing so).
I think the best strategy for someone in your case is to cashout from coinbase into whatever fiat currency you use locally and put that into your bank account.
Should be more encouraging that this guy wants to figure it out instead of pointing and jeering at him.
If the company pays a dividend it gets sent to you (or to whoever holds the stock on your behalf), but that doesn't seem like "using" the stock. I suppose you could "use" it by voting at the AGM.
Crypto you can make use of (such as it is), but no one does that. They hold it like a stock, same as the OP who doesn't know how to create a wallet.
> I suppose you could "use" it by voting at the AGM
Is my stock anything other than the number of shares I see on TDAmeritrade.com? If I wanted to take this thing that I supposedly own and sell it or store it in a way that doesn’t involve TDAmeritrade.com, is that even possible? No fucking clue.
My point was, there is really no "use" for a stock holding aside from the obvious as an investment. So simply investing in and holding a stock is fine.
The popular Crypto coins are supposed to have other uses, like a cash replacement. In fact cash replacement was intended to be the primary use for Bitcoin. But most people treat them as an investment they can just sit on and watch go up, like a stock.
Only purchase the hardware wallet directly from the company website, never used.
Craig Wright (obviously falsely) claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto and thereby copyright on the (MIT licensed but whatever apparently) Bitcoin whitepaper. A UK court ruled in his favor and bitcoin.org are therefore not allowed to distribute it in the UK. They responded with restricting access to both the whitepaper and the software for UK IPs.
A custodial wallet means someone else holds your keys, but a non-custodial wallet lets you hold them yourself (which Bitcoin Core does).
After you download the app you mentioned, it's going to sit and grind your CPU for a long time. After that, you can click on the 'Receive' tab. Every field here is optional, but you might want to fill in the label with something like "from Coinbase". Click "Create new receiving address" and a new window will appear with a QR code and some other info. Copy the address. Then in Coinbase, send your Bitcoin to this address.
Again, this is probably a little watered down, but I hope it helps. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable writes up a better explanation.
It's very fustrating because so many people seem to know how to set up a wallet on their computer/Mac however I cannot for the life of me find a clear wallet to download and move my funds to or a guide on how to do it.
If I downloaded this - https://bitcoin.org/en/download - is that a way to do it? I can't download this in the UK, so is it safe to download it via a VPN and install it that way?
Thank you so much to anyone who sees this and replies.