into her other qubes when she needs to log into her accounts. Bonus: Carol explores new financial technology The vast majority of Carol’s assets are in broad-based, low-cost, passively-managed indexed funds. Lately, however, she’s started getting interested in cryptocurrency. She’s still committed to staying the course with her tried-and-true investments, and she’s always been skeptical of new asset classes, especially those that don’t generate cash flows or that often seem to be associated with scams or wild speculation. However, she finds the ability to self-custody a portion of her assets appealing from a long-term risk management perspective, particularly as a hedge against certain types of political risk. Some of Carol's friends warned her that cryptocurrency is extremely volatile and that hacking and theft are common occurrences. Carol agreed and reassured them that she's educated herself about the risks and will make sure she never invests more than she can afford to lose. Carol has added the following to her Qubes setup: A standalone qube for running Bitcoin Core and an offline wallet vault. Carol finds the design and security properties of Bitcoin very interesting, so she’s experimenting with running a full node. She also created a network-isolated vault in order to try running a copy of Bitcoin Core completely offline as a “cold storage” wallet. She’s still trying to figure out how this compares to an actual hardware wallet, paper wallet, or physically air-gapped machine, but she’s figures they all have different security properties. She also recently heard about using Electrum as a “split” wallet in Qubes (github.com/Qubes-C…tcoin.md) and is interested in exploring that further. Whonix qubes. Carol read somewhere that Bitcoin nodes should be run over Tor for privacy and security. She found it very convenient that Whonix is already integrated into Qubes, so she simply set her Bitcoin Core “full node” qube to use sys-whonix as its networking qube. Various qubes for DeFi and web3. Carol has also started getting into DeFi (decentralized finance) and web3 on Ethereum and other smart contract blockchains, so a friend recommended that she get a Ledger hardware wallet. She downloaded the Ledger Live software in an app qube and set up her system to recognize the Ledger (www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Le…e_Wallet). She can now start her USB qube (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/usb-qubes/), plug her Ledger into it into a USB port, use the Qubes Devices widget to attach it (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/how-to-use-devices/) to her Ledger Live qube, and from there she can interact with the software. She has a separate qube with the Metamask extension installed in a web browser. She can also use the Qubes Devices widget to attach her Ledger to this qube so she can use Metamask in conjunction with her Ledger to interact with smart contracts and decentralized exchanges. Various qubes for research and centralized exchanges. Carol uses these when she wants to check block explorer websites, coin listing and market cap sites, aggregation tools, or just to see what the latest buzz is on Crypto Twitter. Carol makes sure to back up all of her qubes that contain important account statements, confirmations, spreadsheets, cryptocurrency wallets, and her password manager vault. If she has extra storage space, she’ll also back up her templates and even her Bitcoin full node qube, but she’ll skip them if she doesn’t have time or space, since she knows she can always recreate them again later and download what she needs from the Internet. Conclusion The characters we’ve met today may be fictional, but they represent the needs of real users like you. You may find that your own needs overlap with more than one of them, in which case you may find it useful to model certain subsets of