I don't think it would be very profitable for right now to mine Bitcoin and buy ASIC miners, but in theory you could do it and if done correctly with cold storage backup nobody could hack you.

On the other hand, anyone can and should run Bitcoin node to help network and increase privacy in transacions.
You could use VPN for your node but it's waste of money unless you already have some unlimited vpn plan, so good alternative is Tor that is already free.
People are running nodes on old laptops, raspberry pi devices and recently I saw people who are doing that on old smartphones, so you can choose whatever you want and fools instructions.