Thanks for the quick responses guys. I know what to do now to completely delete my information.

It's funny that on this forum people assume that every question is from a newbie. I've had several cold wallets including the Ledger before the notorious data hack, a trezor before it was stolen out of my hotel room and 2 versions of the Bitfi, the latest kept my bitcoin safe but I had to sweep the coins into Electrum as the wallets bricked.

Also if I forget my seed phrase, I'm sure I'll also forget where I stored my super-secret titanium copy. The worst scenario is that I get knocked on the head and forget who I am, but then do my coins mean anything to me. Plus with memorization I can travel world-wide without customs asking me what is this weird little electronic device in my pocket or this note with 12 words on it.

Just sayin'... but thanks for the tips on deleting my files.

I'm using the latest version and installed it on my desktop, memorized my seed phrase, set my password and moved some coins into my wallet.

Since I have my seed phrase memorized and since I'm using Electrum for cool storage, for security I deleted the program from my Windows computer thinking that I could easily recover my wallet with the seed phrase.

About a month later I wanted to check my balance and so re-installed Electrum and when I did I saw I had the option of opening my wallet or starting a new wallet. I selected to open an existing wallet thinking I would need to enter my seed phrase but instead it only asked my for my password and when entered, there were all my balances.

Why is this? If my computer gets stolen all anyone needs to do is crack my password and they get my coins. I want to remove any trace that Electrum was ever on my computer. Can somebody tell me how to do this please?

I don't know...

One guy says it OK to talk about them but don't post links.

Another guy says don't talk about mixers at all but has a like to a wallet with a built in mixer in his avi and signature.

The next guy is talking through google translate? But he seems to be pretty sure I'll be banned for even thinking about mixers.

Its all very confusing especially since the purpose of bitcoin is private, peer to peer payments outside of government scrutiny.

In that case allow me to report that I have successfully used Anonymixer and Whir successfully.

Very nice work and much appreciated.

I'm not "Legendary" except in my own mind, but as a privacy fanatic I am happy to have found my favorite mixer on your list and wonder why "privacy", which was part of Satoshi's original construct cannot be discussed openly here.

Thanks. Its not always easy to know where to put things.

Thanks for that.

Ahhhhh... I see it is a "banned mixer" now.

Can anyone recommend a good one?

I've use [banned mixer] in the past successfully, recently on TOR but I see their thread here is locked which makes me wonder...

As indeed it was and is. Thankfully my rigs heat my shop otherwise I would be out of business. When the weather heats up I'll sell off the hash boards, controllers, PSU's and scrap the aluminum. A sad end to a beautiful dream...

No worries Brother. The transaction completed a few minutes after I posted that.

Its a good feeling to have wallets full of clean satoshi's.

Thanks again for a well run and affordable service.

I'm happy to report several successful mixes using this service. I do have a couple of questions though.

I am in a mix right now that limited me to .2 BTC and I think I know why, but the WARNING! message that pops up is unhelpful in explaining why and is a bit disconcerting.

Also the first few mixes I did were done very quickly but then it seems like they got progressively slower until the present mix I am in has been over 12 hours.

Nice service... just wondering...

I've used coin mixers in the past with good success but since a few wallets like Coinomi have built-in exchanges such as Changelly and CoinSwitch would a short-term exchange of BTC for say, Monero accomplish the same purpose of eliminating the visible trail of coin custody? If so, I would assume that the length of time spent in the alt-coin wallet could be minimal before being brought back to a fresh BTC address.

Any thoughts?

Yup, I totally agree and thats how I ended up with Coinomi. I just can't make myself use another Ledger or Trezor so air-gapped is my best option until I am more comfortable with using the Core wallet.

This discussion has seriously helped me. Thank you all very much.

Absolutely not.

Great information. Thanks guys.

Yah, I'm not technically smart enough to install the Electrum server so I'll take the easier route for now. An air-gapped Raspberry Pi running an Electrum wallet should do the trick for me.

Thanks LoyceV.

I had a Ledger Nano a few years back and almost lost a lot of Satoshis because it could not handle the "dust" (small regular deposits) from my mining rigs and would never stop syncing. I was finally able to recover my sats using Electrum with my passphrase but that whole debacle scared me off of cold wallets (and even more now with Ledger's email database being hacked).

The question remains can I connect Electrum to my node without using one of the Electrum servers?

I have a lot of Sats and have used cold wallets but didn't like them so I put everything into a hot wallet (Coinomi) which is very easy to use with both my desktop and a mobile app and seed phrase recovery (which I like), but I do worry about long term security.

I want to keep my coins on my own node (the latest Core) which I have had running for a month now, but I'm worried about a few things:

1. Recovery is by a .dat file with no seed phrase unless I am missing something, and I suppose I would need to save the .dat file to another computer in case my node fails or the computer running the node crashes. Do I need to protect the .dat file in the same way I would protect a seed phrase? Can someone with the file gain access to my coins? If my box crashes will I have to download the whole Core again in order to recover my wallet with the .dat file? The Core tutorials I look at are either to technical or don't cover things simply enough for newbs to understand.

2. I read articles on how to connect different wallets that use seed phrases to my node but they require me to run an Electrum server which thing is waaay beyond my technical abilities as it has no GUI. Is there a "Connect your wallet to Core for Dummies" guide anywhere?

I love supporting the network by running Core and if thats all I can do I'm fine with that but I would like to take it to the next level without having to go back to school to be a rocket scientist lol...

Its kinda funny that no one in here ever wants to talk about ZEC. I've noticed that since I've been a member.

Zcash mining with ASIC's is like the kid at school who smelled funny.

Oh IIRC maybe a couple of months or so and then as more ASIC's came on line and the price of crypto's across the board dumped, my profits got smaller and smaller. Now I average $2.00 a day per unit after electricity and I can only afford to run them in colder weather.