My understanding is that a sufficiently motivated state can find any computer criminal. It's just a matter of following them long enough until they slip and make an opsec mistake.

Usually the mistake is talking too much. Jeremy Hammond (Stratfor hack) had really good technical opsec but made the mistake of talking about his IRL exploits to Sabu which led the FBI to connect his online identity to his IRL political activism. Had he kept his mouth shut he probably would have never been caught.

haha, you're not thinking like a hacker :)

purchase it using stolen bitcoin. :P

If you use cryptocurrency you've mined yourself it will be anonymous, assuming you've proxied your miners through something to conceal their IPs.

I believe the correct approach is to share your tools and services freely in such a way as they can be configured and used from public computers (e.g. Apple Store, or a recently purchased craigslist laptop from an open wifi access point). The general idea is that you prepare your tools at your leisure, and then invoke and target in anonymity.

I think the implication is that you do mining via whonix/TOR and then use those funds. And then as you aquire more computers you use those to generate more bitcoins for more VPSs.

He also mentions using a hacked WiFi, your pretty safe.

There are a ton of opsec mistakes one can make that a nation state could track. How did you get to that hacked wifi location? Any cameras on the way? How many times did you use it? Shared radius from where you live / work / have ever used a credit card? The pervasiveness of tracking by camera of people / cars / etc makes this very hard to pull off (and I've given it a lot of thought as an infosec professional.)

Buy the bitcoins with cash?