Recommended
Beginner
Intro to Self Custody
Create a wallet, back it up, prove you can recover it, and only then receive bitcoin.
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Library
A wealth of knowledge,
A wealth of knowledge,
at your fingertips.
Setup walkthroughs for every device and wallet, withdrawal guides for Canadian platforms, and advanced material worth a read.
Guide finder
Tell us what you are doing. Answer one question or all three, and the library below narrows as you go — clear it at any point.
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Foundations
Understand the system before you move money
The vocabulary and the decisions everything else assumes you have already made.
These guides were last reviewed Aug 17, 2026 – Sep 7, 2026
Beginner
With great power comes great responsibility
Self-custody does not just remove the middleman. It removes the work the middleman was doing, and hands you the job. Here is exactly what that job is.
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Beginner
What not to normalize
Six habits that look harmless, are extremely common, and are the reason most self-custody losses happen. None of them involve being hacked.
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Beginner
Keys, addresses, and UTXOs
A beginner's breakdown of what your wallet actually holds. There are no coins anywhere — and once that clicks, most of bitcoin's odder behaviour starts making sense.
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Beginner
Choosing your first setup
Most people ask which wallet is best. The useful question is how much you are protecting, from what, and who else needs to be able to recover it — which has a different answer.
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Beginner
Your transaction is stuck
It has been hours, the explorer still says unconfirmed, and the money has left your balance. Nothing is lost. Here is how to tell whether it is genuinely stuck, the two ways to push it through, and the kind of help that will cost you everything.
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Intermediate
Test your recovery without risking your coins
A backup you have never restored is a guess. Here is how to prove it works, including which method to use when you only own one device and it already holds funds.
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Beginner
Send a test transaction first
Before you move the balance, move five dollars along exactly the same route and watch it arrive. It is the cheapest way to find out that something in the chain is wrong.
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Intermediate
Verify a download before you run it
Every setup guide says to check the signature and then moves on. This is the part they skip: the three files, the three commands, and the alarming warning that appears when everything has in fact gone right.
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Beginner
Self-custody is a journey, not a test you pass
Buying an ETF or leaving your first purchase on an exchange is a reasonable place to start, and being told otherwise is why people stall for years. Here is the road out, why it takes time, and how to tell you are ready for the next step rather than guessing.
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Hardware
First-time setup for your signing device
Pick your device for a focused walkthrough, then return for the features worth turning on once the basics work.
These guides were last reviewed Aug 17–18, 2026
Beginner
COLDCARD Q and Mk5
Unbox and check the tamper evidence, set a PIN, generate a seed on the device, and take a backup you have verified. One path, with the handful of places the two models differ called out as you reach them.
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Advanced
COLDCARD advanced features
Trick PINs, duress wallets, the brick-me PIN, and the login countdown. What each one actually does, and the honest accounting of which of them can cost you your own coins.
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Beginner
Foundation Passport
Camera-based air-gapped signing, a backup system that moved to Keycards and SeedQR, and a device that now does considerably more than bitcoin — which is a decision you make during setup.
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Beginner
Blockstream Jade
Jade protects your PIN differently from every other device on this site, and that choice shapes your backup plan. Understand it first, then set the thing up.
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Beginner
BitBox02
The microSD backup is what makes this device fast to set up and the part worth thinking hardest about. Here is how to use it without ending up with one fragile copy of everything.
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Beginner
Trezor Safe
Why the device arrives with no firmware on it, how to record a backup you can actually restore, and which of the extras to leave switched off.
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Advanced
SeedSigner: build and first use
Assembling the hardware, verifying and flashing the image, and the stateless signing model that deliberately keeps nothing on the device. Including the part that is genuinely yours to get right, because nobody sealed this one in a bag.
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Advanced
Krux: install and first use
Krux is firmware, not a device. Choosing hardware to put it on, verifying and flashing the release, generating a seed from dice or a photograph, and the storage feature its own documentation tells you is not a backup.
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Beginner
Ledger
Why the box seal proves nothing, what the genuine check actually verifies, the one optional service to think hard about, and the phishing every Ledger owner should expect.
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Beginner
Bitkey
A wallet with no recovery phrase to write down, because the company holds a third key you can call on. Setting it up, and the honest accounting of what that recovery service can and cannot do.
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Wallets
Drive the wallet software
Creating wallets, pairing hardware, verifying addresses, and the features past the send button.
These guides were last reviewed Aug 17, 2026 – Sep 7, 2026
Beginner
Sparrow: pair a hardware wallet and verify a receive address
Create a watch-only wallet from your signing device, check an address on the device screen, and sign a first transaction.
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Intermediate
Sparrow: coin control and labelling
Your balance is not a number, it is a pile of separate chunks — and which ones you spend together tells anyone watching that they belong to the same person.
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Beginner
Nunchuk: first wallet and shared access
A phone app that coordinates multisig, including wallets shared with another person. What to build first, what to back up beyond the keys, and which features quietly add a dependency.
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Beginner
Cove: mobile wallet setup
A Bitcoin-only phone wallet that can hold a little money itself or drive a hardware signer over QR and NFC. Setting up both, and being clear about which screen you are actually trusting.
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Intermediate
Electrum: watch-only and offline signing
Turn two ordinary computers into cold storage — one that watches the blockchain and one that holds the keys and never goes online. Plus why this is the most impersonated wallet in bitcoin.
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Beginner
BlueWallet: watch your cold storage from a phone
Import a public key and your phone can see the balance but never spend it. What that genuinely costs you, and the one thing you should not use the phone for — which is the thing it makes most tempting.
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Advanced
Wasabi: what CoinJoin does and costs
How a collaborative transaction breaks the link between your coins and your history, what it cannot undo, and why the piece that makes it work is also the piece that has already collapsed once.
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Advanced
Specter: coordinating a multi-brand multisig
Specter is a face for your own Bitcoin Core node and nothing else, which matters more for multisig than for any other wallet. Building a wallet from three different manufacturers, and collecting signatures across three different transports.
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Intermediate
Bitcoin Core wallets, and what wallet.dat actually is
Core's wallet does not hand you twelve words, and the file everyone argues about on the internet is no longer the file Core writes. What is actually in it now, how to make one, and how to load a wallet.dat the Entropy Workshop produced from a seed you already have.
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Buying and withdrawing
Get bitcoin off the platform
Platform-specific withdrawal walkthroughs and the Canadian recordkeeping around them.
These guides were last reviewed Aug 17, 2026
Advanced techniques
Multisig, passphrases, privacy, and inheritance
Earn this section. Every option here adds a way to lose access as well as a way to protect it.
These guides were last reviewed Aug 17–27, 2026
Intermediate
The air-gapped PSBT workflow
How an unsigned transaction reaches an offline signer and a signature comes back, by microSD, QR, or NFC. What the file actually contains, why your device can be lied to, and the one output people never think to check.
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Advanced
Connecting wallets to your node
Running a node and using it are two different achievements. The index layer nobody mentions, connecting each wallet to it, reaching it from outside your house, and proving your wallet is not quietly still using somebody else's server.
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Beginner
Why you cannot think of a random number
Every wallet rests on one unguessable number, and the one tool that cannot produce it is the one you were born with. What people get wrong, how it has been measured, and what it cost the ones who tried.
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Intermediate
Three dice, one word: rolling a seed you can read
One octal die and two hex dice throw exactly eleven bits — one recovery word, with nothing hashed and nothing to trust. The method, the arithmetic, and the one detail that quietly ruins it.
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Intermediate
Roll the dice: generating your own entropy
Make your wallet's secret from dice you rolled yourself, instead of trusting the device to pick it. What to do, in plain terms, and the three mistakes that ruin it.
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Intermediate
BYOE: Bring Your Own Entropy
The Workshop turns coin flips, dice rolls or a shuffled deck into a wallet you can hold against your device. What it does with what you give it, what it refuses to do, and how to check it before you believe a word of it.
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Advanced
Build a 2-of-3 multisig
Three keys, any two can spend. The real work is not the setup — it is the wallet configuration everybody forgets to back up, and the rehearsal that proves the whole thing works.
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Advanced
Where the keys actually live
Three keys in three places is easy to say and easy to get wrong. The locations that only look independent, the window when your keys travel together, and an honest account of what a safe deposit box and a trusted friend each actually do.
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Advanced
BIP39 passphrases, and when not to use one
A passphrase is not a password on your wallet. It is a switch that selects a different wallet entirely — which is why a single wrong character shows you an empty balance and no error message.
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Advanced
BIP85: one backup, many wallets
One seed can generate an unlimited supply of ordinary, independent wallets on demand — so you protect one backup instead of six. The catch is a bookkeeping obligation nobody warns you about, and a master seed that is now worth six times as much to a thief.
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Intermediate
Durable seed backups
Paper survives everything except the events your backup exists for. What metal actually buys you, the four-letter shortcut that halves the work, and the mistakes that quietly ruin a plate.
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Advanced
An inheritance plan that does not leak the secret
Instructions someone can follow while grieving, that are not enough to steal with while you are alive. Why your will is the wrong place for any of it, and the failure that loses more coins than any other.
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Advanced
Planning for coercion
The attack that ignores your cryptography and comes for you instead. Why decoy wallets are weaker than they sound, why being genuinely unable to comply beats lying convincingly, and the arrangements that make a bad situation worse.
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Intermediate
Supply chain, long cons, and the vendor you cannot avoid trusting
You cannot read the silicon, and you did not watch the parcel. Three different problems hide under one heading — the intercepted package, the patient maintainer, and the vendor who simply changes — and only one defence survives all three.
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How it works
The machinery underneath the wallet
Further reading rather than instructions. Nothing here asks you to change your setup — it explains why the setup looks the way it does.
These guides were last reviewed Aug 17, 2026 – Sep 7, 2026
Beginner
What is money?
Cattle, salt, glass beads, limestone discs the size of a small car — plenty of things have done the job, and nearly all of them stopped. They stopped for the same reason every time, and it is the reason a hard cap exists.
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Intermediate
The problem Bitcoin solved
Digital money was considered impossible for thirty years, and the obstacle was not cryptography. It was getting strangers who cannot trust each other to agree on what happened first.
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Intermediate
The life of a transaction
What actually happens between pressing send and seeing a confirmation — the signature, the nonce that must never repeat, the waiting room nobody owns, and the moment your own node decides the payment is real.
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Intermediate
How a wallet finds your coins
Your seed words are not a wallet. They are the root of a tree, and finding your money means knowing which branch to walk down — which is why the same words can restore perfectly and still show a balance of zero.
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Intermediate
From words to keys
How a wallet turns twelve words into a private key — the checksum, the 2,048 rounds of hashing, and the apostrophe in the derivation path that quietly decides whether an xpub can betray you.
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Intermediate
Why addresses look different
Some start with 1, some with 3, some with bc1q and some with bc1p. They are not cosmetic variants — they commit to different spending rules, cost different amounts to use, and are not equally supported.
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Intermediate
What a fee actually buys
You are not paying for the amount you send. You are bidding for physical room in the next block, priced by the size of your transaction — which is why a payment of ten dollars can cost more to send than one of ten thousand.
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Intermediate
The 21 million hard cap
The number is not a policy anyone chose to announce and cannot be raised by agreement. It falls out of a halving schedule, and it holds because every node independently refuses to accept a block that breaks it.
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Intermediate
Why run a node
Without one, your wallet is asking a stranger's computer what you own and believing the answer. A node is how “don't trust, verify” stops being a slogan and becomes something you actually do.
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Intermediate
The privacy you actually have
Bitcoin is not anonymous and never was. It is a permanent public ledger with pseudonyms attached, and most of what links those pseudonyms to you is done by ordinary arithmetic anyone can perform.
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Advanced
How chain analysis reads your wallet
Everyone knows spending two coins together links them. That is one of about eight inferences an analyst makes, and your wallet software has an accent that identifies it. Plus the two defences that work at the protocol level rather than the habit level.
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Advanced
Scripts and Miniscript
Bitcoin can enforce far more than “whoever holds this key may spend”. It can enforce quorums, deadlines, and conditions that change over time — and Miniscript is what made writing those safely something other than a specialist art.
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Intermediate
Who decides the rules
Bitcoin has no board, no vote, and no procedure for changing itself — yet it changes. How that works, why the block size war ended as it did, and what a failed fork in August 2026 demonstrated in under eight hours.
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Beginner
Four ways a platform loses your bitcoin
Not your keys, not your coins is the conclusion. These are the cases it was drawn from — four failures with four different mechanisms, none of which announced itself in advance, and one of which was Canadian.
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Intermediate
What is actually protecting your seed
Every device guide on this site says the PIN protects the device rather than the seed. This is the part underneath that sentence — what a secure element is, what happened to the devices that did not have one, and the two things that actually survive someone holding your hardware.
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Beginner
Eight questions to ask about any digital asset
"Crypto" is a category label rather than a description of how anything works. These are the structural questions that separate the things inside it: who can change the rules, who was allocated what, and what it would cost them. Bitcoin's answers are the worked example.
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Entropy
Test the method
Check how your device turns physical randomness into a wallet, using a test sequence rather than the rolls behind a wallet you use. The tool is experimental, and meant for exactly that check.
Entropy Workshop
Enter your dice rolls, coin flips or drawn cards and see the recovery words and first addresses they convert to — then compare that against what your device showed you. If the two disagree, your device uses a different conversion, which is common and worth knowing before you trust a column of rolls as a backup.
- Beta software — for testing, not for securing real bitcoin
- One file, with nothing loaded from anywhere
- Use it here, or save it and run it on a machine that has never been online
- Checks itself against the published BIP test vectors on load
- Generates no randomness, and has nowhere to type an existing phrase
Download the file
Enter a test sequence, not the rolls behind a wallet you use. Roll the dice explains the procedure and the rules that matter more than the tool does.
Also worth a minute: the guessing machine in Why you cannot think of a random number. It calls your next tap before you make it and seals the guess so it cannot cheat, and it explains faster than any article can why nobody should invent their own randomness.
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The library is still being written, and requests decide what gets written next. If your device, platform, or situation is not covered yet, say so.