The story of NodeCove
Two minutes to understand what your node changes.
What we stand for
Declaring what you buy, yes.
Being tracked afterward, no.
We don't contest the rule. When you buy bitcoin on a platform or through a bank, it verifies your identity and passes the information to your tax authority. That's the law, it applies to everyone, and what you owe to declare, you still owe.
What we contest is what happens after. Declaration doesn't stop at the purchase: it becomes a starting point. Your addresses are known, the blockchain (bitcoin's public ledger of accounts) can be read by anyone, and private companies trade on automatically linking everything that follows, how much you hold, where you spend, who you exchange with. No one voted on that part, and no one asked for your opinion.
Cutting off that surveillance takes two things, not one. A node, so your wallet no longer has to ask a stranger's machine where your bitcoin stands. And a very good VPN, because the plain line that carries those questions already says a lot: without it, your internet provider sees at what hour and at what pace you deal with your bitcoin. An ordinary VPN is not enough here: one that gets spotted, then cut off, leaves you exposed at the exact moment you thought you were covered.
With NODECOVE, we don't erase your purchase. We cut off what comes after: the automatic surveillance of everything you do next.
And we do not think that quality should be a privilege. Protecting yourself has no reason to cost the price of yet another subscription: with us, it is the price of a coffee a month for the VPN, two for the VPN and the node together.
What changed, and when
January 1, 2026
The European directive known as DAC8 applies: every platform that handles bitcoin reports its customers' transactions to its own state, and tax authorities exchange this data automatically. There's nothing to ask for and nothing to justify: the flow already exists.
Above €1,000
For a withdrawal to your own wallet, the platform must verify by technical means that the destination address really belongs to you. It no longer assumes it: it archives it. Hence the point of having two wallets, one for them and one for you alone, as we explain further down.
July 10, 2027
Article 79 of European regulation 2024/1624 bans regulated institutions from holding anonymous accounts and from handling privacy coins. This isn't a hypothesis: it's an already-published timeline.
What stays out of scope: direct transfers between personal wallets. These texts target regulated intermediaries, not individuals. It's narrow, it's real, and it's exactly the space we work in with NODECOVE.
We don't contest that a state can investigate money laundering, with a warrant and resources. We contest that everyone is registered by default, on the grounds that a few commit fraud.
Because what is recorded does not stay in good hands: a database ends up leaking, being resold or hacked, and an AI can now search it in seconds for people who do not necessarily wish you well. NodeCove doesn't put anyone beyond the reach of a targeted investigation, and isn't meant to. With NODECOVE, we take on the other thing: default collection, on everyone, without suspicion. That is what we protect you from.
The separation
Without NODECOVE, your two wallets send the full list of their addresses to the same unknown server, from the same connection, often within the same minute.
That matching is automatic, free, and immediate. No one has to investigate: the two lists arrive together. With NODECOVE, the question is no longer put to anyone: the node that answers is queried by you alone.
Wallet 1
The one the platform knows, that it has verified you control, and that it has reported. It exists, it's in order, and it keeps living out in the open. You have nothing to hide from it.
Wallet 2
Best if it fills up separately: with bitcoin coming from other people's private wallets. If you do move bitcoin into it from the first wallet, the declared one, don't do it right away, not all at once, and not in full, and keep topping it up from elsewhere too. What protects you isn't the absence of a link: it's having several, none of which tells the whole story.
The separation
Without a node, your wallet has to ask a stranger where your money stands, and so that he can answer, it hands him the list of all your bitcoin accounts, several times a day. That stranger learns in one go that they all belong to the same person, without having to look for anything. With your node, the question is put to your own machine, and nobody else hears it. That's the only part technology can genuinely remove, and it's the part we remove.
The method
If your bitcoin is sitting on a platform, you don't really own it: the platform holds it. It can freeze your account, get hacked, or comply with an order. The rule is old and still holds: if you don't hold the keys, you don't hold the coins. These five steps are guided with NODECOVE, in this order, without you having to guess what comes next.
Install a wallet on your phone or your computer: this will be your declared wallet. If you don't already have one, take Blue Wallet: it's free, it exists in almost every language, on iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux, and the step-by-step manual shows its installation screen by screen. Withdraw your funds there. Your keys finally belong to you, and the first link with your identity stops right where it was created.
If you don't have a second wallet, take BULL Wallet on your phone, or Electrum or Sparrow if you'd rather keep this part on a computer. Ideally it fills up on the side, without going through the first one: a peer-to-peer purchase, a sale, an invoice or a salary paid in bitcoin (peer-to-peer venues, compared). This is the slow part of the method. If you still need to move coins that are already declared into it, spread it out: several times, on dates far apart, never all at once, and keep other funding sources going in parallel. A single, immediate transfer from one to the other writes the link in plain sight and forever; spread over time and mixed with other inflows, it no longer proves much.
Without a node, your wallet asks a stranger to verify your transactions, and hands them the list of your addresses every time it opens. With your own node and your own indexer, this list is never disclosed again. In each of your wallets, enter the address of our node, electrum.nodecove.net on port 50002 over SSL/TLS, and check the setting that forbids any other server: your wallet must never query anyone but ours again. We detail this setting screen by screen for Sparrow, Electrum, Blue Wallet, BULL and Nunchuk.
Without a tunnel, your internet provider sees that you're talking to the Bitcoin network, at what time and at what pace. With ours, it sees an encrypted stream heading to a destination with no recognizable signature. Stealth mode is on by default, in both our plans.
Three ways out, and none of them goes back through the platform that knows your name. Pay directly in bitcoin or Lightning, to a person, a craftsperson, a merchant who accepts it. Resell peer-to-peer. Or top up a virtual Visa card with no identity check: the one we know best is called Freedomia, and it's funded from your reserved wallet, the one from step 02, never from your declared wallet: topping up from the declared one would hand Freedomia addresses already linked to your identity. The rule that holds everything else together: never a direct transfer from your reserved wallet to a platform that holds your papers, because that day you'd be the one handing it the link, past included. The usage threshold, the fees and what bothers us about it are written in Getting out without going through a platform, further down, and the full path in the step-by-step manual.
As soon as the amount would hurt to lose, a hardware wallet keeps the key on the device: an infected computer can prepare a transaction, it can't sign it in your place. For bitcoin, the Blockstream Jade is one of the best choices on the market: its firmware is open and can be rebuilt identically by anyone, and therefore verified by others besides the manufacturer. We compared eight devices, license by license, to explain this choice rather than impose it on you. We have no referral relationship with this manufacturer: this is information, not a sale.
The network
Why us rather than someone else? For three reasons, and you don't have to take our word for them: they can all be verified before you pay.
Others promise not to watch you. We can't: we receive no information about you at all. Unlike most of our competitors, who keep your data only to erase it later, we keep no record of what you do, so there is nothing to erase. We cannot hand over what we have never written, and rather than ask you to trust us, we publish the exact record of what our database contains, field by field, with its retention period.
Payable in bitcoin, no name, no card, just an anonymous email address. A contact address is the only thing required to receive your configuration; it can be dedicated to that sole purpose, and we never check it against any identity. We suggest Proton Mail.
It works where an ordinary VPN is recognized and cut off. At the office, in a hotel, in an airport, in a country that filters: where other VPNs get spotted and then blocked, ours looks like ordinary Internet traffic and keeps going through. This is what we call stealth mode.
We use AmneziaWG, an obfuscated derivative of WireGuard: the same performance as a modern tunnel, but without the tell-tale signature that filtering networks learn to recognize in order to block VPNs. Obfuscation settings can be adjusted city by city, letting us react when a network tightens its filters.
What this doesn't mean: that filtering is a solved problem. We never use the word “undetectable”: a determined operator, with time and resources, can analyze traffic. Stealth mode raises the cost of that analysis, it doesn't eliminate it. It's a race, and we present it as one.
Our PO boxes
A VPN needs PO boxes to work with your envelopes, and each of these cities is one we put at your disposal. Your envelopes leave from it, the answers come back to it, and at the far end all anyone sees is the box, never your home. It belongs to no one in particular: several people use it, so nothing says which of the letters is yours. Take the closest one for speed, a more distant one for what's only offered elsewhere, and change whenever you like. None of them keeps any record of what passes through.
These cities are also spread across several hosting providers with no ties to one another, not just across several countries. This second point matters as much as the first.
A city is in the end a machine rented from a company, which can fail, change its terms, close an account, or receive a legal order; when a whole fleet is rented from the same place, geographic spread is just decoration. Our machines are today spread across several unrelated companies, billed separately. Our internal infrastructure is hosted separately and never serves as a PO box.
What this gives you, and what it doesn't. The day one of our hosting providers fails us, its machines go down and the others stay up: you lose one city, not your access, and your devices registered elsewhere keep working with no action needed from you. On the other hand, replacing a lost city takes a few days, not a few hours: renting a machine, hardening it, installing our transport and its DNS resolver on it, then measuring it before opening it. We don't open a city we haven't tested. So we're not selling high availability per city, but a fleet that doesn't go down all at once, and a recovery time we state instead of hiding it.
We don't display any advertised latency from our machines: it wouldn't tell you anything about your own line. It's your browser that measures, below, the response time to each city.
Which one is closest to you?
Mesure en cours …
Measurement taken by your browser, result kept on your device.
Response time, often called ping, is the time a small message takes to travel from your device to a machine and back. It's measured in milliseconds: the smaller the number, the better. It mostly depends on distance and the quality of your line, not its bandwidth: a fast fiber connection to the other side of the world will always respond more slowly than a modest connection nearby. This is the figure that matters for a call, an online game, or anything that needs to react instantly.
The measurement is taken by your browser, directly to each city, and the result stays on your device: we never receive it. The figures are accurate to within a few milliseconds: it's the ranking that matters, not the decimal. If you're already using another virtual private network, it will skew everything: you'd be measuring the distance from that other service's machine, not from your location. Turn it off, then take the measurement again with the button above. We don't repeat it on every visit.
Europe · Romania. Outside the so-called Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes agreements, and three data-retention laws there were struck down by the Constitutional Court. A member of the European Union, however: judicial cooperation is very real there.
Northern Europe · Finland. Outside the so-called Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes agreements, an EU member however. The Constitution declares the secrecy of communications inviolable there, and an independent ombudsman oversees what can breach it.
Africa · South Africa. Outside the so-called Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes agreements, and outside the European Union. Interception there falls under a law requiring authorization from a designated judge. Also kept for latency on the African continent.
Europe · United Kingdom. Kept for latency from Western Europe. A founding member of the Five Eyes, and a jurisdiction where data retention can be imposed by secret notice: we offer it for its performance, never for its legal protection.
North America · United States. Kept for latency on the Pacific coast. Home country of the Five Eyes: along with London and Montreal, this is one of our least protective jurisdictions, and we own that. No federal retention obligation, however.
North America · Canada. Kept for latency across the North American continent. A founding member of the Five Eyes, like London, and a lawful-access bill is awaiting the Senate there: we offer it for its performance, not for its protection.
North America · United States. Kept for latency on the East Coast and for the transatlantic route. Home country of the Five Eyes, like Los Angeles: one of our least protective jurisdictions, and we own that. No federal retention obligation, however.
Central America · Panama. Outside the so-called Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes agreements, and outside the European Union. The Constitution declares correspondence and private communications inviolable there. Two important caveats, however, which we state.
South America · Brazil. Outside the so-called Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing agreements, and outside the European Union. One caveat we'd rather state: Brazilian law requires one year of connection-log retention.
Asia-Pacific · Singapore. Low latency for the whole region, and a jurisdiction distinct from our European cities, that's precisely the point of not clustering cities in the same country. On the other hand, no constitutional right to privacy.
Asia-Pacific · Japan. Outside the so-called Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes agreements, without being isolated for all that. Secrecy of communications is guaranteed there by the Constitution and by the telecommunications law. Two recent caveats, however.
Your node
A wallet app doesn't hold your bitcoin: to know what you own, it has to ask a computer that isn't yours and that answers thousands of strangers at the same time. A node is that computer. NODECOVE's answers only to your wallet, and to no one else.
Without a node, your wallet queries a stranger's machine every day to find out what you own. So it has to give that stranger the list of all your addresses, every time it opens. That stranger then learns how much you have, when you check, and from which connection, and nothing stops it from answering you incorrectly.
With NODECOVE, the question no longer leaves the tunnel. The node that answers you is hosted at our provider, but it works only for you and we read nothing on it: it holds the full copy of the Bitcoin ledger and recalculates everything itself, transaction by transaction, from the very first one. You no longer have to take anyone's word for it, and no one holds the list of your addresses anymore.
Full Bitcoin Core and private Fulcrum indexer; private Lightning node planned for the first quarter of 2027. On computer with Sparrow, Electrum, or Specter; on phone with BULL Wallet, BlueWallet, or the Blockstream app. Included in NODECOVE.
Pillar 1
Today your wallet asks a stranger's machine every day where your bitcoin stands, and shows it all your accounts along the way. With ours, that question never leaves your home, and we don't read it either: otherwise we would just be the next stranger.
Pillar 2
Networks that block VPNs know them by their look. Ours doesn't have that look: seen from outside, what you do looks like ordinary internet use. Nothing to switch on, nothing to understand, and if a network gets stricter, the disguise can be reinforced city by city.
Pillar 3
Keeping your bitcoin in separate pockets, knowing where each coin comes from, and spending without telling everyone. Simple habits, which we walk you through one by one, and which stay with you even if you leave us.
Pricing
Price shown per month, in euros, settled in bitcoin. The amount actually billed is written just below, you pay for the whole period at once. No automatic billing: at renewal, you decide.
COVE
Browse without being tracked, even where VPNs are blocked
The VPN: stealth mode included
€71.28 billed once for 24 months
You save €48 compared to monthly
No commitment: €4.97 per month · Over one year: €3.97 per month
COVE is also available monthly, with no commitment: you can try it, then switch to one or two years once you're sure about us.
Get COVEThe most complete
NODECOVE
No one can link your bitcoin to you anymore
All of COVE, plus your Bitcoin node
€143.28 billed once for 24 months
You save €48 compared to two one-year subscriptions
Over one year: €7.97 per month · No monthly plan
NODECOVE isn't available monthly. Setting up a node and keeping it synced takes commitment on both sides; we'd rather offer an annual subscription than a degraded service.
Get NODECOVEAmounts converted at today's rate from your connection, as a guide. Payment is in bitcoin, for the value of the amount in euros.
NODECOVE is the node and the VPN: both together. COVE is the VPN alone, without the node. Stealth mode isn't reserved for the higher plan: it's included in both.
Order
COVE · 2 years · €2.97 per month, €71.28 billed once
You choose your city, the equivalent of your PO box, in the next step, on the payment page. Your email address is used to send you your payment confirmation and your configuration, no other information is requested. Payment in bitcoin or via Lightning, no automatic direct debit.
Because a card means a name, a bank, and a billing address. To collect it, we'd need an intermediary that requires your identity, keeps it, and hands it to us: we'd then have something to hand over to whoever came asking. We prefer being unable to betray our promise over asking you to trust us.
In bitcoin, there's no intermediary to satisfy: we receive payment directly. We ask for no name, no address, no ID, because none of that is needed to open a tunnel. With Lightning, the payment isn't even recorded on the public ledger.
Let's be precise, because this is where many lie: this doesn't magically make your payment anonymous. If your bitcoin comes from a platform that has seen your ID, that link already exists there. What bitcoin guarantees here is that there's nothing to seize on our side. And the downside, which we also write plainly: a bitcoin payment is irreversible, there's no chargeback and no refund. Details in our FAQ.
How to buy bitcoin
A step-by-step path, with the recommended app for your region, then the comparison on the only question that matters: do they really let your bitcoin out?
Your plan includes 50 GB per month, download and upload combined, across all devices. We never cut off the service.
| This month's usage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Up to 45 GB | Nothing. |
| From 45 GB | An email notifies you. Speed unchanged. |
| From 50 GB | Speed drops to 10 Mbit/s download and 3 Mbit/s upload. |
| From 60 GB | Speed drops to 1 Mbit/s download and 0.5 Mbit/s upload. |
To picture 50 GB, take your own usage. About 22 hours of 1080p video, 44 hours at 720p, a good hundred hours at 480p, and that holds for YouTube as well as Netflix, which advertise comparable bitrates. Nearly 700 hours of music at high quality. About 25 hours of video calls, download and upload combined. For everything that isn't video, the meter barely moves: nearly 19,000 web pages at today's median page weight, or hundreds of thousands of emails without attachments.
Online gaming, on the other hand, weighs almost nothing: over 200 hours of Valorant or Counter-Strike 2, 500 hours of Fortnite, more than 2,000 hours of Diablo IV. Details by game and the one setting not to miss.
These figures rest on the bitrates services publish themselves, not on our own measurements: at 5 Mbit/s for 1080p, an hour of video weighs 2.25 GB. On the move, our own usage runs around 20 GB per month, Netflix included.
| What you're comparing | COVE | NODECOVE |
|---|---|---|
| Tunnels open at the same time | 11 | 22 |
| Browsers connected to the customer account | 3 | 7 |
| Stealth mode | Included | Included |
| Private Bitcoin Core node and indexer | · | Included |
| Private Lightning node | · | Planned: 1st quarter 2027 |
| Monthly quota | 50 GB, gradual throttling | 50 GB, gradual throttling |
| You can refer others | Yes | Yes |
| A referral who takes this plan earns their referrer | 2 months | 3 months |
| Available cycles | Monthly, 1 year, 2 years | 1 year, 2 years |
Rate for the first 1,000 customers, locked in for life. After that, 1 month whichever the plan. The referral gets 1 month on their side.
The counter resets on your subscription's anniversary date, not the 1st of the month. Bitcoin payments aren't reversible: there is no refund, and we'd rather state that here than hide it at the bottom of the page.
Referral
Every subscriber has a personal link. When a referral pays for their first subscription of a year or more, you both earn months, added to the end of your contract.
No payout, no payment to claim, no bank details. We never pay a cash commission: we don't want to, and the European framework on crypto payments would make it disproportionate for everyone.
Founding member: first 1,000 paying customers
3 / 2
months per referral, depending on whether they take NODECOVE or COVE · rate locked in for life
After that
1
months per referral
Your referral, in both cases
+1
free month on their side
Rule 1
You must hold a live subscription, COVE or NODECOVE. Your referral has to take a year or two years: a monthly subscription opens no credit, neither for them nor for you.
Rule 2
The credit is granted when the referred person pays for their first subscription, only once per person. Their subsequent renewals do not create another credit.
Rule 3
The months earned extend your due date: the node's if it is running, the tunnel's otherwise. They don't refund what's already paid. You'll see them appear in your dashboard.
No commission, no payout in euros or in sats, no retroactivity: a referral who signs up before using your link doesn't count. Four referrals won over at the founding-member rate, and your year is paid for.
Your keys
Your bitcoin isn't stored in a box: it's recorded on a public ledger, and what decides it's yours is a long string of characters, your private key. Whoever holds it can spend it. A wallet installed on your phone or computer keeps that key on the same machine as your browser, your email, and everything else installed there: it only takes one program getting the right permissions to read it, and you'll see nothing.
A hardware wallet is a small device, often the size of a USB stick, whose sole job is to keep this key out of reach of any computer. The transaction is prepared on your usual screen, but it's signed inside the device, after you've read the amount and the address on its own screen. An infected machine can therefore ask you to pay; it can't sign in your place, nor copy your key. This screen is also the only place where the address shown isn't one a piece of software chose to show you, that's the most common fraud, and a software wallet can do nothing against it.
NODECOVE doesn't sell this device: we document which one to get, where to buy it without giving your name, and how to set it up.
The key is born inside the device, at first startup, drawn at random by the device alone: it has never existed anywhere else, and it never comes out. No manufacturer, no software, no service knows it, so no one can take it from you, and no one can recover it for you if you lose everything.
At first startup, the device also has you write down twelve or twenty-four words. That's your key in readable form, and your only recourse if the device is lost, stolen, or destroyed: those words restore your wallet on any other device. Write them on paper or engrave them in metal; never photograph them, never type them into a phone or a password manager, and no one, not the manufacturer, not us, needs to know them. Whoever reads them empties your wallet without ever touching the device.
That leaves choosing which one. The usual question, which device is most secure, fills five hundred websites and adds nothing new. We ask a different one: what does the manufacturer know about you, and can you verify it? The best device is the one that never learned your name.
In 2020, one major manufacturer's customer database leaked, then was published in plain text: roughly a million email addresses, and nearly 272,000 full records with name, postal address, and phone number. People who bought a device to protect their wealth ended up on a public list of likely bitcoin owners, with their delivery address. These records still circulate today.
We therefore recommend a device whose firmware is open and verifiable, and that works without depending on a service run by the manufacturer. Open, because the program that handles your key must be readable by people other than the one who wrote it. Without a service, because a device that requires the maker's own app to function becomes useless the day the company closes, and chatty for as long as it exists.
The one we mention, and why
On these criteria, the Blockstream Jade holds up well: open firmware, bitcoin-focused, and above all reproducible, the manufacturer's published procedure lets you recompile, on your own machine, the image installed on the device and verify that it matches the published code. You don't have to take their word for it. It's not the only serious device, and we don't sell any.
We have no referral link to this manufacturer, and we get nothing if you buy it. We mention what we use ourselves; our business is the node and the VPN, not reselling hardware.
Whatever the device: buying it with a card in your name and having it delivered to your home creates exactly the link you were trying to avoid. Pay in bitcoin, have it delivered somewhere other than home, or buy it in person. We compare eight devices, license by license, on the Protecting your keys page.
Spending
Holding discreetly is pointless if spending sends you back to the counter. Three paths exist: pay directly in bitcoin or Lightning, sell over the counter, or top up a payment card with no ID check. All three are documented in NODECOVE, with what they cost and what they reveal.
On this last path, we document Freedomia: a virtual Visa card rechargeable in bitcoin. You open an account with an email address, you receive a personal top-up address, and you send it bitcoins, via Lightning or ordinary bitcoin. They're converted into dollars and credit the card immediately, usable online and in stores.
What we owe you before you click. Typical usage sits around $5,000 per month: that's a threshold, not a guarantee. The issuer's terms explicitly state that beyond it, identity verification and anti-money-laundering checks may be required. The card is also unusable in sanctioned countries, some of which our stealth mode exists precisely to get through.
The bitcoins you transfer to Freedomia become a balance held by a third party, who sees all of your purchases linked together and whose terms allow it to freeze that balance. A card is a pocket wallet, never a vault: only put in it what you're about to spend.
You top it up from the reserved wallet, not from the declared wallet: a top-up sent from a wallet linked to a platform that holds your papers would be tied to your name in a second. Freedomia, for its part, doesn't know your name, it only sees the addresses the money comes from, and those addresses were never announced to anyone, since your reserved wallet only queries your own node. If they're hacked or compelled, all they'll get is a guess, not a certainty.
Affiliate link: NodeCove earns a commission at no extra cost to you. Freedomia is a service independent of NodeCove: we document it, we don't control it.
Doing it yourself
Nothing obliges you to go through us. A node at home is the most sovereign solution there is, and we'd rather tell you what it actually takes.
Our own costing of a redundant setup, built to last for years, comes to around €4,650 in hardware, excluding electricity. A full Bitcoin Core node with an indexer writing continuously: that's the item that drives the cost, not the processor.
If that 4 650 € and the maintenance put you off, NODECOVE does the same thing for €5.97 per month, with no machine at home and no electricity to pay for.
Honesty
✕ We don't make you invisible
No service can. An authority that genuinely targets you, with a warrant and resources, remains an authority that targets you.
✕ We don't erase your past
What a platform has already reported stays reported. We work on what comes next, not on what's already behind you.
✕ We don't promise unlimited at full speed
Traffic itself is unlimited: we never cut off your access, whatever the volume. What's limited is speed beyond the quota, and the tiers are spelled out on this page. We'd rather announce a throttle than promise an “unlimited” that ends in a cutoff.
✕ We never use the word “untraceable”
Stealth mode raises the cost of traffic analysis, it doesn't eliminate it. A determined operator, with time and resources, can analyze a flow.
✕ We don't sell impunity
The service isn't designed to conceal a crime and we'll never present it that way. If a customer abuses the service, we cut off access.
✕ We don't exempt you from anything
Privacy isn't tax evasion. What you're required to declare, you still owe, and we sell nothing that claims otherwise.
The same honesty applies to our own data. We keep the private key for each device so you can re-download your configuration, our servers are rented from hosting providers we don't control, and our emails go through a third-party provider. The five points where our position is less clear-cut are written in plain terms in the caveats we owe you.
Frequently asked questions
No, and that's the first misunderstanding to clear up. Bitcoin is pseudonymous: every transaction is public, permanent, and viewable by anyone. What isn't public is the link between an address and your name, but most people create that link themselves, by buying on a platform with an ID, or by querying third-party servers about their own addresses.
Yes, through over-the-counter marketplaces, ATMs, or by being paid directly in bitcoin. Each route has its own cost and constraints; we document them without using any of them ourselves and without answering for them.
Not entirely, and be wary of anyone who tells you yes. The platform recorded the withdrawal address, and that starting point stays on record. What you can do is stop making things worse: keep those coins in the declared wallet, never mix them with the reserved wallet's, and build cleanly from there.
In bitcoin, on-chain. Lightning payment isn't open at launch: accepting Lightning requires locking up bitcoin in channels, and we'd rather do that with the service's own revenue than promise it with nothing behind it. We plan it for the first quarter of 2027. If you have never bought bitcoin, the beginner's manual shows you how, step by step.
Ordinary bitcoin, the kind called "on-chain", records every payment on a public ledger, permanently. You have to wait for a block to be produced, on average about ten minutes, sometimes longer when the network is busy, and fees follow that load: a few cents on quiet days, several euros on busy ones.
Lightning is a layer built on top. Two parties open a channel funded in bitcoin, then exchange payments between themselves without recording anything on the ledger: it's instant, it costs a few cents regardless of the day, and only the channel's opening and closing appear publicly. The amounts flowing between the two don't.
To pay us, it's the chain that's used at launch: you scan an address, you send, the payment is recognized from the first confirmation. Lightning will come later, and will mainly improve the comfort of the monthly payment: a few cents in fees instead of network fees, and instant settlement. We won't open it before we have the liquidity to do it properly, first quarter of 2027.
Running your own Lightning node, on the other hand, is a real commitment, and we would rather say so than have you find out later. You need to lock up bitcoins in channels, make sure the funds are on the right side of the channel so you can pay or receive, back up the node's state, since an outdated backup can cost you the funds involved, and stay connected to receive. That is why NODECOVE's Lightning node, planned for the first quarter of 2027, will be there for anyone who wants to get into it, documented and guided, but nothing obliges you to touch it: the private Bitcoin Core node and indexer are enough to keep your wallets private.
A sat, or satoshi, is the smallest unit of bitcoin: one bitcoin is made up of a hundred million of them. It's used because small amounts are much easier to read this way, 2,000 sats reads better than 0.00002 bitcoin. The name comes from Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin's author.
You'll come across this word in wallet apps and on rechargeable cards, which often count in sats. It's the same thing as bitcoin, just written in a smaller unit: nothing changes about what you hold.
Because a card means a name, a bank, and a billing address. To collect it, we'd have to go through an intermediary that requires your identity, keeps it, and hands it to us: we'd then have something to hand over to whoever came asking. Our whole promise would collapse, and we'd rather be unable to betray it than ask you to trust us.
In bitcoin, there's no intermediary to satisfy: we receive payment directly. We ask for no name, no address, no ID, because none of that is needed to open a tunnel. With Lightning, the payment isn't even recorded on the public ledger.
Let's be precise, because this is where many lie: this doesn't magically make your payment anonymous. If your bitcoin comes from a platform that has seen your ID, that link already exists there, and a simple transfer won't erase it, as explained above. What bitcoin guarantees here is that there's nothing to seize on our end: we hold no bank details, no identity, no proof of anything. And the downside, which we write in plain terms: a bitcoin payment is irreversible, there's no chargeback and no refund.
KYC stands for "know your customer". It's the obligation placed on banks and platforms to verify who you are before serving you: ID document, proof of address, sometimes a photograph of your face, and keeping all of it for years. This is what we call identity verification elsewhere on this site.
A “no-KYC” service asks for none of that: an email address is enough to open an account, so it has nothing to hand over if asked. That doesn't mean it's outside the law, or that it's unlimited: most set a cap beyond which verification becomes required again.
We ourselves ask for no name, no address, no ID, because none of that is needed to open a tunnel. We can't hand over what we've never written down.
The Freedomia card, the one we document, advertises a standard limit of $5,000 per month and per card, with no ID requested below that threshold. Beyond it, its terms explicitly call for identity verification and anti-money-laundering checks. So this isn't a promise of no oversight: it's a threshold, and it can be changed by the provider.
You open an account with an email address, you receive a personal top-up address, and you send it bitcoins, via Lightning, or ordinary on-chain bitcoin, both are accepted. The amount is converted into dollars at the day's rate and immediately credits a virtual Visa card, usable online, in stores, and by phone. Top-up fees are 1.3%, with no exchange fees on payments in dollars.
As soon as the amount would hurt to lose, yes. The key is generated on the device and never leaves it: an infected computer can prepare a transaction, but it can't sign it in your place. And remember that buying it with a card in your name, delivered to your home, creates the very link you wanted to avoid.
Companies group addresses that appear to belong to the same owner by spotting patterns: change outputs, address reuse, round amounts, timing. The most reliable is the common-input heuristic: when several coins are spent together in the same transaction, they're controlled by the same hand.
Grouping addresses remains a probabilistic guess: a solid hypothesis, sometimes wrong, never identification on its own. What turns it into certainty is a verified name attached to one of the addresses, or a transaction that spends coins from both wallets together. It's almost never their work that links you, it's your own action.
COVE is the VPN: your PO box on the network, stealth mode, 11 simultaneous connections. NODECOVE is the VPN and your Bitcoin node: the same network, plus a private Bitcoin Core node and indexer, 22 connections, and the guided setup; the private Lightning node will follow in the first quarter of 2027. Stealth mode is included in both.
It's the obfuscation setting that makes your traffic look like ordinary noise, for networks that recognize and block the signature of standard VPNs. Technically, we use AmneziaWG, an obfuscated variant of WireGuard. It's active by default on our profiles, in both COVE and NODECOVE. When a network tightens its filters, we adjust the obfuscation parameters in the affected city. It's a race, not a guarantee, and we present it as such.
All the ones that accept a custom Electrum server. Their coverage doesn't overlap, hence this list:
If you only have an iPhone, choose BULL Wallet, BlueWallet, or the Blockstream app: Electrum, Sparrow, and Specter don't exist on iOS. On computer, Sparrow and Electrum remain the most complete.
You receive a server address and a port. In Sparrow, it's Preferences then Server. In Electrum, it's the server selector at the bottom right. In BULL Wallet and the Blockstream app, it's in settings, under the Electrum server section. An illustrated guide comes with the NODECOVE subscription.
Yes, and that's actually the goal. The danger comes from a third-party server receiving both address lists; your own node, however, is yours and reports to no one.
iPhone and Android via the Amnezia app, Mac, Windows, and Linux via the official client. For a game console or TV, the profile is installed on the router and then covers the whole household, in which case it counts as just one device.
Your line's full speed, up to your monthly quota. Beyond 50 GB, speed drops to 10 Mbit/s download and 3 Mbit/s upload; beyond 60 GB, to 1 Mbit/s and 0.5 Mbit/s. The service is never cut off, and the counter resets on your subscription's anniversary date.
London 🇬🇧, Singapore 🇸🇬, Bucharest 🇷🇴, Helsinki 🇫🇮, Tokyo 🇯🇵, Johannesburg 🇿🇦, Panama 🇵🇦, Montreal 🇨🇦, Los Angeles 🇺🇸, New York 🇺🇸, and São Paulo 🇧🇷 at launch, others will follow. We state each one's jurisdiction, without dressing it up: a fast city in a country that's part of an intelligence-sharing agreement is useful for latency, not for legal immunity, and we say so.
Nothing is charged automatically. We notify you beforehand. Without renewal, a NODECOVE falls back to COVE if that's still running, then access stops. Your registered devices aren't erased right away.
No. Bitcoin payments aren't reversible and we don't offer refunds. We write this here, on the pricing page, and in our terms, so no one discovers it after the fact.
Your Bitcoin keys remain yours: we've never had a copy of those, and we never ask you for them. A wallet connected to our indexer can switch to another by changing one line. We commit to notifying you beforehand, not to disappearing overnight.
In months of subscription, never in money. If you are among the first 1,000 paying customers, each referral earns you 3 months if they take NODECOVE, 2 months if they take COVE; after that, 1 month in both cases. Your referral gets 1 month on their side. You must hold a live subscription, COVE or NODECOVE, and your referral must take one year or two years. The credit is granted only once, on the referral's first payment.
The first 1,000 paying customers get 3 months per referral who takes NODECOVE, and 2 months per referral who takes COVE, instead of just one. This rate is yours for life, whenever your referrals arrive.
On your referral's first payment, only once per person, never retroactively. Months earned push back your renewal date; they don't refund what's already been paid.
If your subscription has expired when the credit was due, that credit is lost. Your referral's month, however, is still owed: they don't pay for your oversight.
No, never. No payment in euros or in sats, no bank details to provide. We have no interest in that, and the European framework on crypto payments would make it disproportionate for everyone.
An email address, your subscription and its dates, your devices' public keys, an aggregated monthly traffic volume, and your payment history. The What we see about you page details each field, its purpose, and its retention period, including the four points where our position is less clear-cut.
No connection logs: no browsing history, no list of destinations, no client IP address, neither in plain form nor transformed. Our approach isn't to regularly erase, but to never write it down: a log purged every hour still exists for an hour, and you'd have to take our word for it. Data that's never written requires no trust at all. To be precise about the little that remains: your customer account shows the last activity time of your browser sessions, so you can close one remotely. The What we see about you page lists everything, without exception.
No. Your node and your indexer are yours, and we don't read their queries. That's actually the whole point: if we read them, we'd simply be replacing the unknown server with ourselves.
Without a tunnel, it sees that you're talking to the Bitcoin network, at what time and at what pace. With our tunnel, it sees an encrypted flow to a destination that shows no recognizable signature. It still knows there was traffic, that, no service can take away.
Yes. The site, your account, and the payment page also answer at a .onion address, on the Tor network: no DNS request for our domain leaves your device, the site's name doesn't appear in your connection, and a domain block no longer stops you from arriving. If you're already in the Tor browser, it will offer you this route on its own. Both addresses and their limits: access via Tor.
The disk holds no connection history, so there's nothing to extract about the past. However, a machine seized while running exposes its in-memory state, and some jurisdictions allow requiring surveillance going forward. We don't claim to escape that. It's also why we spread our cities across several jurisdictions.
We respond to what is legally enforceable against us, and we only hand over what we hold. Since we don't write connection logs, a request about a subscriber's past activity has no response to give. We cannot hand over what we have never written. To remove any ambiguity about what we actually hold, and therefore what would be handed over: what a legal request would obtain from us.
Partly, and it's only fair to say so. You can measure latency from your own browser, connect your wallet to our indexer and see that it no longer queries third parties, test the bypass on a filtering network, and verify each of our regulatory claims against the sources we publish. What you can't verify from outside is that a log isn't being written on a machine you don't control, no one can, with any provider. That's exactly why our architecture is published.
The European directive known as DAC8 applies. Crypto-asset service providers report their users' transaction data, and this information is automatically exchanged between member states' tax authorities. There's nothing to ask for and nothing to justify: the flow already exists. It's the starting point for everything we write here.
Article 79 of European regulation 2024/1624 bans, as of this date, regulated institutions from holding anonymous accounts and from handling privacy coins. In other words: within the regulated circuit, privacy as a product feature becomes impossible. Outside that circuit, nothing bans owning or running a node.
Running a Bitcoin node is legal in nearly every country. Using an encrypted tunnel is also legal almost everywhere, with notable exceptions where use is restricted or requires authorization. It's up to you to know the law that applies to you; we can't do that for you.
Yes. Holding several wallets is no more objectionable than holding several bank accounts, and declaring what you're required to declare remains your obligation either way. Privacy isn't tax evasion, and we don't sell the latter.
We cut off access. The privacy we stand for is that of ordinary people faced with collection that targets no one in particular and catches everyone. It's not immunity, and we don't sell it as such.
In some countries, including China and Russia, the stores block or hide VPN apps. We keep a verified copy of the official installers for Android, Windows, Mac and Linux, and we explain how to do it on iPhone. Install AmneziaWG another way →
A network of volunteer relays that routes your connection through three successive machines, each of which knows only the one before and the one after. No one along the way can see both who you are and what you are requesting. You access it with the Tor Browser, which is free and installs like any other browser.
The dark net refers to the sites that exist only within this network, with an address ending in .onion. Ours is one of them, as are those of the New York Times, the BBC, and several libraries. A .onion site is not an illegal site: it is simply a site you can reach without going through the domain name system. There is illegal trade on this network, just as there is on the ordinary web, and using it says nothing about you.
Because in a great many countries, reading a foreign newspaper, writing to a human rights organization, or reaching a lawyer can get you into trouble. Tor was designed so that the mere existence of a connection reveals neither the person nor the destination. It serves journalists, doctors, political dissidents, and anyone who would rather not leave a record of their reading behind.
Through our .onion address. A block targets a domain name or an address: it does not reach a service accessed through Tor, since there is no longer a domain name to block. The site, ordering, your account area, and payment all work there too. Write this address down somewhere other than on this site while you still have access to it: once the domain is blocked, you will no longer be able to come and find it here. Both addresses and their limitations are covered at access via Tor.
We have only one address: nodecove.net. Another domain name showing the same pages is not ours. And our address on the Tor network is the reference: it is written in your delivery email, no one else can take it over, and it is the one that settles any doubt about a link.
No, the two do not do the same job. Tor protects web browsing very well, but it is slow, it is not suited to gaming, video calls, or the traffic of a Bitcoin node, and some networks recognize and block it. Our tunnel, on the other hand, has no known signature and gets through where everything else fails. With us, Tor is used to reach us and pay without leaving a trace of the order, while the tunnel is used for your everyday activity.
To go further
If this is your first bitcoin or your first VPN, the beginner's manual takes you by the hand, step by step. The four pages below are for those who want to understand in depth: buying without getting trapped, protecting your keys, connecting your wallets to your node, and knowing exactly what we see about you. Everything is checked against official sources, and no one pays us to recommend an app or a device.
Paying
Fifteen apps compared on the only question that matters: can you actually get your bitcoin out. The six steps of the first send, network fees versus the house margin, and twelve mistakes with no “undo” button.
Keeping
Eight hardware wallets, license by license and backed by source code. What a recovery phrase actually protects, and what no device protects.
Connecting
Sparrow, Electrum, Blue Wallet, Bull and Nunchuk, screen by screen and in real screenshots. Where to enter our node's address, how to forbid any other server, and how to check that it really is your node answering.
Us
Field by field, what our database holds and what it never writes down. What we would hand over under a legal request, and why that fits in so few lines.
Your own PO box on the network, and a Bitcoin node that answers only to you. That's NODECOVE, from €5.97 per month.
Payment in bitcoin only. No refunds. This service is not intended to circumvent any legal obligation.