After loosing all my funds as I explained on my yesterday's thread, I am trying to change and explain my current situation. I am new and never used BTC wallets.
So, after reading all the posts yesterday, I decided to create a wallet of my own. Here's my plan, I will start practicing how will I recover wallet if I brick my PC. I am choosing ELECTRUM on my Windows PC and keeping it in a separate USB drive with its portable version.
However, I was a shitcoiner, {sorry @DarthCoin, I don't want to become your enemy}. And here are all my $HITCOINS on uphold account. This is relatively small amount that I can afford to loose while I practice swapping in accounts.
How should I go about transferring from UPHOLD to ELECTRUM/ BLUEWALLET ?
  • Should I first convert these shitty coins to BTC and then send it over to BTC network which should be received in my Electrum ? (Here I will incur 2 fees, 1 while conversion, another while transfer)
  • Or should I transfer it to XRP (with relatively negligible fee) by make a new wallet like Metamask and then transfer to Electrum ?
Any other helpful way??

Note: Sorry if my question is too dumb and the amount is just around 10 USD so I can understand if not many of you see this as useful. I can delete the post if this is the wrong channel to ask for help.

You don't need to be sorry. Learn from the mistake and try to don't do it again!
For the process, correct. You use whatever platform you are familiar to exchange everything to bitcoin. If you can and if you're planing to store the BTC for long term, invest some sats on a cold wallet hardware.
Metamisk does not support Bitcoin, so you will use only to make the exchange.
Welcome to SN, stay humble and keep stacking sats (only!)
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Metamisk does not support Bitcoin,
Via their extensions/add-ons/snaps you can now https://snaps.metamask.io/snap/npm/btcsnap/
I am not saying one should at all, personally I wouldn't ever, just pointing out that it's a possibility now.
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This is so convoluted, I will skip most prob
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Yeah, take it from another recovering shitcoiner, just use pure btc things; and learn to use the self custody things - no stress, do it at your pace.
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You don't need to be sorry. Learn from the mistake and try to don't do it again!
THIS, well said!
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Here I will incur 2 fees, 1 while conversion, another while transfer
Being a shitcoiner always will have a cost... I would suggest to dump all those shitcoins for USD and then with the USD buy BTC from a P2P non-KYC exchange.
Also very important! NEVER EVER use anymore Uphold, they are actually HoldUp. Read ALL my guides and your life will start fresh. I am glad you took this important decision in your life. You will, gonna make it!
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Yikes, straight to the P2P non-KYC?!
OP, @DarthCoin is correct. Non-KYC is going to have a little more learning curve up front. But after you have done it a few times, it gets really easy. Also, you don't have to worry about about usernames and passwords and getting verified and all that shit that comes along with normal KYC exchanges. I would argue that non-KYC is actually simpler!
I'm sure most of us here will be willing to help you with any questions getting started.
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Will read your link. Thanks for this suggestion. I will skip and ignore all KYC based exchanges from now on.
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Just a heads up.... it can be trickier to buy large amounts on non-KYC exchanges. They are really good for buying under 1 Million Sats at a time. This makes them great for dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin over time.
Another heads up: I think RoboSats only works on the Lightning Network. So you'll need a LN wallet first. A little education on how LN works and why we use it could go a long way in helping get set up. I recommend keeping your purchases in Lightning until you get a large amount saved up, and them move them to on-chain Bitcoin. At least greater than 1 Million Sats. Custodial solutions like Wallet of Satoshi are okay as long as you move the funds to your non-custodial wallet periodically. (DarthCoin might strike me down for even suggesting a custodial Lightning wallet... just don't keep large amounts there and you're fine)
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Mutiny Wallet can swap between lightning and on chain, Non-Custodial with a lightning node in the browser. In beta though.......
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Yea, there are a lot of great developments on this in the pipeline.
It has been frustrating for newcomers to understand, so I'm hopeful that these future developments will make it much easier and seamless for people. They shouldn't have to understand the nuances of Lightning in order to use it. We just aren't at that point yet, as the BCHers love to keep pointing out.
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Thanks, I will read about Mutiny as well, and see if I can go ahead. Thank you all. It is really frustrating and overwhelming for me.
But a big shoutout to StackerNews. I can finally ask someone and there are people here who genuinely help instead of just scamming me out. I don't have any bitcoin buddy to hold my hands but I'm trusting on SN for headstart.
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Robosats supports on chain as well now
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Thanks a lot. I am transferring everything from uphold now. I will have to look up for how to dump into USD though, since being from an Asian continent, USD isn't used much here and KYC norms are too strong with exchanges as I tried to create account on Binance etc. so I skipped and came here for advices. I will have to look at non-KYC exchanges for transferring from Uphold. I will definitely buy through P2P when I start fresh with my saved money.
I discovered your guides yesterday, thanks for writing those. I will start fresh soon after rectifying all past mistakes of Shitty coins and Shitty exchanges.
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Can't you just sold them in uphold for USD or whatever fiat and then move out?
I discovered your guides yesterday, thanks for writing those.
I am very happy that with my guides I could save a lost soul and put him back on the right path.
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I can, if I added my Bank Accounts/ Cards but that's not the case with my country location. However, I can send to BTC chain with a 3 USD fee. That's what I am thinking to do now. or XRP network has no fee, so somehow change that to BTC network. Hoping to get some suggestions here.
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53 sats \ 1 reply \ @FS 21 Sep 2023
If i was to be in this situation now, i wouldnt take the route you are doing. Only because the amount isnt risky yet.
At this stage I would convert all to BTC. Get a reputable lightning wallet (maybe alby+bluewallet). Even though its custodial is not an issue in your case. And send them over lightning.
This is not the best approach, but you can do this relatively safely until you get to $100 then start moving into a better lightning solution. Maybe Phoenix, or by that time, new Zeus would be out.
When you get to a $1000 start moving to a real wallet on chain.
The reason I am saying all this, is i want to save you as much transaction fees as possible. This is really good especially if your exchange supports lightning. Binance does now, if you are on binance.
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Not yet on Binance. Thanks, this is the best route I came across till now. It is currently on Uphold, so I have to transfer these to somewhere that supports lightning.
Missing puzzle piece is "Which platform supports lightning too, and is non-KYC so that I can transfer my funds from Uphold to that platform?"
I have an empty Alby wallet though (with whatever coins I have from SN) so I can use that platform to send to Alby.
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This is the perfect channel to ask for help!
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That is a frightening username.
I am choosing ELECTRUM on my Windows PC and keeping it in a separate USB drive with its portable version.
So like this video says you want to be using a fresh image (tails USB is specifically what its recommending) and removing all wireless from it. That means the WiFi NIC, Bluetooth, and no connecting via Ethernet is not acceptable either. 100% disconnected from the internet.
So that's probably going to work fine for the amount we're looking at (heck a hot wallet is probably fine for the amount we're looking at) but like idk what country you're from. I've seen people say they can live off of stacker news tips because they're just from a country were you can live off of that amount of money.
Anyway, so this probably isn't useful right now given the size of your stack, but since you did play around with all kinds of shitcoins, do Bitcoin the courtesy of playing around with all kinds of setups and wallets.
At a certain point, maybe you'll appreciate the methodology of Liana wallet: https://wizardsardine.com/liana/ Which is, no BIP 39 seed phrases, just have a lot of devices and timelocks laying around that losing or bricking a few PCs doesn't mean you lose your funds because you just have access to your funds on so many devices.
Maybe one day, you'll have saved so much money that you start to think about glacier: https://glacierprotocol.org/ Or maybe you take a few lessons from glacier now, but think this or that part of its recommendations is not for you right now.
There's a lot to learn. So if you're ever bored and you think there's nothing left, you're wrong. Hit up SN so we can point you in the direction of something new.
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Thanks a lot for such a detailed description. There are lot of new terms here like Glacier, BIP 39 etc. that I have to read about. But rightnow my first priority is to dump all shitcoins and move to BTC. Although, I am new so understanding BTC addresses, NIPs, hot and cold wallets, Mutiny, Electrum, BlueWallet, XRP address etc. seems too overwhelming so playing with whatever little shit I have.
Once I gain confidence, I might be able to buy BTC from my savings which is around 200-300 USD. Thank you all. I appreciate so much.
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I am seeing a lot of sats in your future as you detail your reformation from shitcoining to bitcoin maxi. I look forward to observing your journey.
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Thanks so much, I appreciate. I might need lots of advice specially during starting steps. You might see my more questions whenever I feel struck. I am watching my steps closely and asking wherever I am confused. All of Google and web-search, youtube is full of shitty and non-genuine advices. I rarely found any help since last 2+ years other than this platform. Thanks to u guys.
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You will find many helpful bitcoiners on here. Bitcoiners get a bad wrap as toxic but my experience is they are very kind and helpful to those who genuinely want to learn and toxic to those that want to scam, exploit or exhibit excessive hubris.
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Definitely felt that vibe here. It's just my first week on StackerNews and already finding courage to open up and ask questions that I was stuck with since last 2+ years. Stuck with no solution at all. This place makes me feel like my screams are heard and cared for. BIG THANKS.
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Props to you for making the switch man :)
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I realize that a bunch of other people have given you advice on this already, but here's my attempt. I'm going with the "easiest and cheapest approach you might actually use" route, as I've been in your shoes before and understand what would probably be the best way to do this.
I'll assume with this that you're not registered on any other exchanges. Uphold sucks, by the way, their fees are ludicrous and they don't allow withdrawal of your assets to many of the networks they claim to "support".
Seeing as the majority of your funds are in BAT, I would first trade that into ETH, if they have a BAT/ETH pair, so you don't incur an additional fee on swapping from BAT > USD and then ETH > USD again, you can go BAT > ETH and then swap out all of the ETH > USD, since you might not even qualify to do a transaction for as low as under $1. Again, you may not be able to do the same with your RUNE, but you can try swapping that out to USD as well.
Here's the step I'm sure many here will disagree with, but I'll hold firm on my advice since you're messing with under $10 here. I would take that USD you accumulate on Uphold and use it to buy something with the lowest transfer fees possible. Been a while since I've been on Uphold, but the idea of using XRP is only a good idea until you realize that all XRP wallets require you have a "deposit" amount of 10 XRP minimum on your self-custody wallet, so that right there would eat up about 50% of your funds.
If they have Solana on Uphold, or XLM (Stellar), I would go with that. Or Nano. In that order of preference...Nano has kind of fallen into the shitter and few places use it anymore. If you go with Solana the fees on it will be negligible, and they probably have a very low minimum withdrawal amount, as the fees to withdraw will be like 0.002 SOL or so from the exchange (which is like 4 cents or so, in reality they are only paying about 1/4 of a cent). You can withdraw it to your own self-custody wallet, I would suggest using the "Phantom" wallet (phantom.app is the website). It's quite simple to use and set up, on mobile or desktop. Solflare is another good wallet for Solana as well.
If you have to go with Stellar instead, the best wallet that I know of for it is the LOBSTR wallet (on mobile) or the xBull wallet (on desktop, it's a chrome/brave extension). On Stellar you have a similar situation as XRP but the deposit minimum for your wallet is only 1.5 XLM which currently is about 20 cents, give or take. On SOL there is no such minimum.
Once you have the funds on Solana, I would suggest that the route you go is either to use a decentralized swap service like Fixedfloat -- it's a self-custody swap service and they support lightning BTC. You basically go to their site (if you're in the USA you'll have to use a VPN FYI) and then choose to do a swap from Solana to Lightning BTC. You should make sure to leave a tiny amount of SOL in your wallet for the fees, somewhere around 0.02 or 0.03 SOL is more than enough.
The way that Fixedfloat works is that once you generate the swap you can either pick from a set fee (which is 1%) or a float fee (which is 0.5%), the difference being on a float fee you can potentially get more or less of what you are swapping for depending on if the market moves in the time it takes to do the swap. Since the process of this will be near instantaneous given that Solana takes 400 milliseconds for a transaction to confirm, and BTC on lightning takes about the same amount of time or less, you can safely choose the lesser fee and be fine with it.
Once you put in the numbers of what you're sending (the amount of SOL will be around 0.5 SOL given current market prices) it'll show you on the screen how much BTC you're expected to get.
Now the last thing we need to do is have a wallet for you to receive the BTC on lightning with. If you're on desktop PC, I would recommend going with the Alby wallet. The website is https://getalby.com -- of course there are going to be people on here who, like much of the rest of my comment, will disagree with me and say you should be running your own self custodied lightning wallet and own node and blah blah blah. Don't listen to them, this is insane. On mobile there are a few different options, people tend like Breez, Phoenix or Wallet of Satoshi for mobile LN. To be honest there's not really a good mobile (or desktop) self-custody LN wallet solution available yet, so I would say go with Alby and be done with it. Make sure you save all of your information in your password manager or somewhere else safe, including somewhere you can write it down offline.
To receive the funds from Fixedfloat to get your lightning BTC in your Alby wallet, you just click on "receive" in the wallet UI and you enter in the number of sats you are expecting (optional) and then click generate to generate a LN "invoice", this is basically a long ass string of letters and numbers that tells the Fixedfloat site (or anything else you're doing with lightning) where to send the funds to, how much, a note if they want to include it, etc. Just copy and paste it into the Fixedfloat site and then click to process the transaction. It should all take like literally under 30 seconds.
Then you're done, and you've got yourself some BTC on lightning network.
I just realized after writing all of this that if you're here on this website, you've already got some kind of a lightning wallet and a way to get sats, so you're probably already using alby or something else along those lines, if so, disregard.
Once you figure things out and stack some sats on here or elsewhere in the LN ecosystem (you'll find people can be quite generous and kind if you're not an asshole and are contributing actually useful/interesting material, not spamming for sat tips lol) you can always swap your LN BTC back out to mainnet bitcoin quite easily.
I prefer the fantastic swap service (that I learned about here, actually) called BOLTZ -- they are the only one that I use for swapping bitcoin into lightning network bitcoin, and vice versa. Their fees are incredibly low, next to nothing (especially from mainnet BTC > lightning -- the other way around can be a tad costly depending on the current rate on the mainchain, when average fees were at ~44 sat/vB earlier today, the cost to do a swap of around $50 of lightning BTC back to mainnet BTC would've cost me ~$3.50, just FYI) and it's all done non-custodially, in your own wallet. I would suggest leaving this end of things until you have other stuff figured out, and you can figure out what kind of a wallet you want to use on your bitcoin journey. But if you do this and get yourself your sats on lightning network, you're already like 90% of the way there in my opinion, don't let anyone get you down or discourage you.
Welcome, by the way. Sooner or later this sort of thing tends to happen to everyone and they realize that the only real option for staying in this "space" and remaining sane is to embrace inevitability and join with the bitcoin 'maximalists'. Feel free to let me know if you need any help, sorry for writing this long-ass novel.
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Thanks a lot for such a long and detailed response. This is one of the best and most elaborate advice I have got so far. I will try to follow it step by step, and read a few terms along the way that I am unsure of. I appreciate this a lot.
I will update again in this thread if I am stuck and in need of help. BIG THANKS :)
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@dieselbaby Thanks for saving my ass last time. My crypto exchange that got bankrupt is giving us 30% of the recoveries over ETH (and can only be sent over ERC20 network).
Since, I have already created the Phantom wallet last time, I used its ERC20 network to receive the ETH. I'm still waiting for funds to show up in Phantom wallet, since they will process in couple of working days. But now my next step will be to convert again this ETH to BTC (offline electrum wallet).
What do you suggest I should do? Should I again go for Fixedfloat and select ETH >> to >> BTC with 0.5% Float rate or you suggest anything different. I am discussing each step not to mess my already lost funds and want to secure everybit I can to BTC electrum wallet.
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Successfully converted all shitcoins to Solana as you suggested, out of Uphold finally. Used Phantom extension. Now I'm unsure of if I should directly transfer it to self-custodial BTC wallet (i am thinking of using Sparrow/ Bluewallet/ Electrum) or LN Alby wallet.
As I have already set up Alby for this SN, I have a general idea of how I can transfer. But I have used any self-custodial wallet yet, I want to learn how to transfer stuff (send and receive), do backup, store keys etc. so I am thinking of going with that. Not sure. Will do some more reading before next steps. THANKS AGAIN. You helped a lot, your long post was actually very clear for me to understand and gave me rationale about why I should skip XRP and go ahead on SOL network.
Now I want to get on BTC now. Let's see.
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We all have been there. From shitcoiners to Bitcoiners.
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And now you're getting some free sats as a reward for the step. Keep going, because the rewards will increase as you go.
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Never be sorry for trying to learn/understand the Blockchain technology, nor apologize to someone you don't know, unless you did something to hurt him/her... That said, learning always has a cost, either you pay it before hand or you pay it after, some pay more than others and it takes time to learn this stuff, nothing happens overnight. Most of plebs have gone the same rabbit hole, even if some of them don't want to recognize it, so put yourself up and start fresh cuz the future is bright! Learn about how to buy BTC with No KYC and you should be rocking and rolling my fren
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Yes, I learnt it today. I earlier though that noone will let me buy/ exchange bitcoin without KYC. But now i will look into this. Will read some stuff to transfer my funds to some self-custodial wallet with keys and then try some P2P with small amounts.
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Welcome to Bitcoiners) Unfortunately, many people need to experience all the "charms" of shitcoins and lose everything before they can go back to their roots and start using Bitcoin.
You made the right choice, now keep learning and you will succeed.
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No amount is too small and Lightning network is efficient to facilitate this, I personally use Wallet of Satoshi on mobile and GetAlby on Desktop
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If Uphold allows you to convert and send (with low fees) using XRP, perhaps you can try using FixedFloat (https://fixedfloat.com).
Allows you to convert from one currency to another. It is not P2P, but it also does not have KYC, so it is better than using any exchange.
What I don't know is if Uphold will cause problems when sending to the wallet addresses that must be indicated. But to look and try.
It's all about learning, and then being able to teach or advise.
I have just sold all my shitcoins, even at losses, investing again in other assets and closing the accounts of all the KYC platforms I have been on. It is a slow process, but it is possible.
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Nice move
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Welcome!
You could also swap everything to a shitcoin you can find here https://fixedfloat.com/ (perferably with low transaction fees, so xrp is maybe a good choice) and then swap it to either your electrum wallet (on-chain) or a lightning wallet (phoenix?).
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Thanks, I will look at this during this week. There is a lot to read about for me in this thread.
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You said the worst thing in this group. But your deed is well. You could live longer.
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