Noob question: I am planning to buy a new desktop PC and to store bitcoin on
Bitcoin Core Desktop Wallet full node.
I am currently doing that on my laptop. I bought it from
ZaReason, it's tailor made designed to run linux.
Now I moved to Taiwan and don't want to import from abroad, since so much hardware is produced here. Knowing that
- I'd format the hard drive to get rid of preinstalled Windows OS
- I'd get these specs:
Do you think there is any possibility of hardware backdoor, or any leftovers from Windows, that would put my bitcoin at risk? I plan to use it as my main, home workstation.
Yes, you have a backdoor, every intel cpu has a backdoor for nsa or their three letter friends to snoop on you.
Go with raspberry pi or arm or amd
Not every Intel... you should be safe if you use a Core2Duo, but only if you Libreboot it, which means you will need to do hardware changes unless you buy one that is directly modified by someone you can trust. There are some Laptops like the Thinkpad x60 which only require you to flash the bios and do some changes without modifying the hardware.
If you want it to be ME free by default, you have to go as back as Pentium 4...
With AMD, you have PSP, so it's the same, and you can't disable it, we know less about the PSP than the ME. You would need to back in time too, I think 2013 was the last year it was PSP free. Still faster than a Raspberry.