Are there other ways to buy it that allow more privacy?
As Ambatman wrote, you can use decentralized exchanges. But there's a catch: Most of these exchanges work with bank transfers. This means that when you pay the Bitcoin seller, you reveal them personal information like your bank account number and your full name. You could of course use the bank account of a friend, but not every friend will be comfortable with that.
There are a few ways to acquire Bitcoin which do not have that problem:
- Mining. That should be obvious, but it's not for everyone.
- Selling virtual goods for Bitcoin. IMO an underrated method, although of course you must have your sources for the virtual goods.
- Selling disk space on a platform like Siacoin, and exchange the altcoins you obtain for Bitcoin via atomic swaps. That method has lost popularity over the years, because the market is small.
- Buying Bitcoin in person, for cash.
- Buying BItcoin via cash per postal service.
And what about wallets, how would someone go about things if they really wanted to stay private?
If you don't want to use Bitcoin Core, and really are paranoid about your privacy, you can use a "light" wallet like Electrum in a quite convoluted way which is almost as private as a full node:
- Use it with Tor
- Create a seed, but do not use it directly for a wallet. Instead, re-use that seed for many wallets, adding an additional word to each wallet seed. This can be as simple as "wallet1", "wallet2", etc.
For example: if you have the seed
platform use like directly wallet instead many adding exchange course problem account, then create the following wallets:
platform use like directly wallet instead many adding exchange course problem account wallet1platform use like directly wallet instead many adding exchange course problem account wallet2and so on. Thus you have to store only one seed.
- Use only ONE address per wallet. Never re-use it (this means you will have to create a lot of wallets if you transact regularly).
- Restart tor every time you change wallets.
- Use a passphrase for all wallets (can be the same one)
The reason for this strange procedure is that light wallets typically reveal all your addresses to a server (full node). And this server knows then which addresses belong to a single wallet. If you're unlucky it's a chain analysis company ...