Bitcoin on the Home Server: Sovereignty with Coldcard, Sparrow and Fulcrum

This post is a direct follow-up to my recent articles about the new home server with openSUSE MicroOS and the Minisforum MS-S1 Max. Those covered the foundation. Here I want to show one concrete use for it: putting together a decent Bitcoin stack at home, focused on privacy, operational sovereignty and safe transactions on my side.

To counter the dismissal of general hardware as a cold wallet, your view on threat models itself is a bit hopeful.

Best summarized by xkcd, https://xkcd.com/538/

Having a dedicated device that screams "hey I have bitcoin" is almost always going to be more of a risk than a dedicated general compute device of plausible deniability. A device such as a phone with wireless and usb data disabled, encrypted, accessing data stored in an app that has it's own encryption on top.

Its cute to romanticize the idea that some threat actor will be up against some impossibly secure device, the reality tends to be a lot simpler https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks especially if they find you have dedicated hardware with the sole purpose of securing crypto.