The first time I got into Bitcoin was through Telegram. There was a bot that would give you a few sats every day for free. All you had to do was link your email, and those sats would eventually show up in your Coinbase account, along with some pretty questionable altcoins.
The catch was that you needed to reach a minimum amount before you could withdraw. So I waited about 4 or 5 days. Right when I was about to send my sats, the bot got reported and shut down. I never managed to withdraw anything. In total, I think I had accumulated something like $0.05 cent.
To this day, I still don’t understand why that bot existed or where those sats came from. But I clearly remember the feeling: it was basically worthless… yet it felt good to have sats.
This happened sometime between 2015 and 2017 (I’m not exactly sure), but I do remember seeing Bitcoin around $15k at some point.
Since I was underage and had no money, I never bought any Bitcoin myself. I lost interest and stopped using Coinbase. Eventually, I even lost access to my account after receiving an inactivity notice.
Years later, in 2025, I tried to get back into it. I bought a $300 course that basically taught me how to buy BTC on Binance, move it to a hot wallet… and repeat forever. It was disappointing. It felt like there wasn’t much real value, so I decided to stop trusting those kinds of “mentorships.”
But this time, I didn’t fully walk away. I started doing my own research and found communities where people actually discuss Bitcoin in a deeper way.
In my country, the social security system I contribute to doesn’t feel very reliable. It honestly feels like it could fail in the future. So I’m considering using Bitcoin as a long-term savings strategy: buying a percentage of my income on the first day of every month, regardless of price, as a way to prepare for retirement.
The idea is to steadily accumulate sats. Maybe use Binance to buy, take advantage of flexible savings options to earn a bit more, and then, every time I reach certain milestones (like a few thousand dollars), move everything to a cold wallet.
But I still have some important concerns.
For example, KYC. If I buy through exchanges like Binance, my identity is linked to those coins. And seeing cases in countries like France, where criminals target people known to hold Bitcoin, makes me wonder if something similar could happen in Latin America.
I also question whether using “no-KYC” platforms like Hodl Hodl really makes a difference, if in the end you often rely on payment methods like PayPal that still require verification—and usually come with higher fees.
So I’d like to open the discussion:
- Should KYC really matter if Bitcoin is supposed to be pseudonymous?
- Is buying on Binance, accumulating, and periodically moving to cold storage a solid strategy?
- Does it make sense to use flexible savings products while accumulating, or is it better to withdraw immediately?
- Is avoiding KYC worth the extra cost and complexity?
- How do you personally balance convenience, security, and privacy?
I feel like I’m just starting to truly understand Bitcoin—but this time, I want to do it right.
A simple story and concerns about the future
byu/Wise_General9072 inBitcoin
Posted by Wise_General9072
2 Comments
it’s a tough lesson but a common one when starting out. those ‘free sats’ bots on telegram are almost always a lure for phishing or email harvesting. the best part about bitcoin is that you don’t need anyone’s permission or a ‘bot’ to participate—once you move to a self-custody wallet, the noise of these scams usually fades away. for kyc, it’s a trade-off: convenience on exchanges vs. privacy on p2p platforms like hodl hodl. if you’re holding long-term, moving to a cold wallet is definitely the right move regardless of where you buy.
>I also question whether using “no-KYC” platforms like Hodl Hodl really makes a difference, if in the end you often rely on payment methods like PayPal that still require verification—and usually come with higher fees.
Like all things in life, it’s not white and black. There are nuances. Sure, in the end, anything is trackable. With enough resources, you could build a supercomputer that simulates reality with 100% accuracy and know everything about everyone.
Payment on no-KYC platforms can be done with cash, which is extremely difficult to track, but it is very inconvenient.
The thing about paying with Paypal and similar is that while Paypal knows who you are, they don’t know what the money is used for when you’re using P2P KYC platforms. To them you’re just sending money to another random person. You could be buying anything from them. So there is no way for them to even know that you’re using Bitcoin.
As for the person you’re trading with, depending on the payment platform you use, they might see your name and/or a transaction confirmation number, or nothing at all. Technically *they* could link that information to the Bitcoin, which is why it’s important to never reuse the same address and use anonymized id information on payment platforms and enabling all privacy features. Still they’d need to have an motive to link your identity to the coins (maybe they’re nosy, maybe they’re a criminal, maybe they’re an IRS agent, maybe they don’t care).
This is vastly different from centralized exchanges systematically recording the identity attached to all trades and forfeiting that information to authorities whenever they request it and leaking it anytime their security measures fail.