Wallets and Custody
12 posts
- 1Beginner
The Complete Guide to Bitcoin Wallets
A comparison and selection guide for Bitcoin wallet types, with beginner-friendly explanations covering everything from hardware wallets to mobile wallets.
- 2
Why Self-Custody Is Essential
FTX, Mt. Gox, QuadrigaCX... Billions of dollars in customer funds have vanished in exchange collapses. A practical guide to truly owning your Bitcoin through self-custody.
- 3
Online Wallet or Locked Vault, Pick the Right One for Your Bitcoin
A comprehensive comparison of cold storage and hot wallets for Bitcoin - hardware wallet reviews, air-gapped signing, multisig setups, and the optimal storage strategy for every level.
- 4Intermediate
Coldcard, Jade, Trezor, Ledger: A Security Model Comparison
A comparison of four hardware wallets from the perspective of attack surface, security model, and software transparency. Evaluated against actual disclosed vulnerabilities and design decisions rather than marketing copy.
- 5
Lose These 12 Words and Your Bitcoin Is Gone Forever
A deep technical guide to Bitcoin seed phrases - BIP-39 entropy, HD wallet derivation (BIP-32/44/84), passphrase protection, and battle-tested storage methods.
- 6Intermediate
The Keys Alone Will Not Find the Vault
A seed phrase restores keys and nothing else. Which addresses those keys produce is decided by a single line called an output descriptor. An experiment where the same three keys yield five different first addresses, how to read a descriptor and its eight-character checksum, the multisig case where a threshold of seeds still cannot open the vault, and how to back it all up.
- 7Intermediate
How Bitcoin Gets Stolen: A Practical Security Guide
A comprehensive guide to securing your Bitcoin - from private key management and hardware wallets to multi-signature setups and real-world lessons from catastrophic security failures.
- 8Intermediate
The First Six and Last Six Characters Matched
One attack plants a fake address in your transaction history, matching your own address at both ends, and waits for you to copy it someday. This follows a real case on Bitcoin where 0.1 BTC left a wallet, step by step through the blockchain record, then covers why the same attack is far cheaper on Ethereum, how the same tiny deposits are used to break privacy, and what you can do in your wallet.
- 9
What Happens to Your Bitcoin if You Die Tomorrow
A comprehensive guide to Bitcoin inheritance planning - covering multisig schemes, Shamir's Secret Sharing, timelocked transactions, and practical steps to ensure your Bitcoin survives you.
- 10Intermediate
Proof of Ownership Without Moving a Coin
Signing a message with a Bitcoin address's private key shows that you control the address without moving a single coin. From the 2011 signmessage to BIP-137 and BIP-322, completed in 2026, plus what a signature cannot prove and how exchanges verify self-custody wallets.
- 11Intermediate
The 620,000 Bitcoin That Lived Only in the Ledger
In February 2026 the Korean exchange Bithumb credited 620,000 BTC to customer accounts while holding about 42,000. Starting from the fact that an exchange balance is a number in a ledger, this covers what proof of reserves can and cannot show about whether an exchange really holds your coins, and how far Korean regulation has come.
- 12Intermediate
Can Quantum Computers Actually Break Bitcoin?
What the quantum threat actually is. The thing that breaks is not your wallet but an exposed public key, and over 6 million BTC already have theirs on-chain. BIP-360, BIP-361, and the property-rights fight over coins nobody moves.