Bitcoin Butlers17 nodes1 open

Custody Roundtable

A public decision tree for Bitcoin self-custody, built one question at a time from the answers of people who design and use these setups. Where answers disagree, the tree branches.

How do I know I am the only one who knows this secret, while minimizing dependency on any one piece of hardware or software? Every node follows from this

The tree

0Premise, not debated

  1. 00 Bitcoin's properties only hold if you are the bearer settled, in the intro

ACertainty of the secret

  1. 01 Self-custody vs. collaborative custody vs. exchange open for answers
  2. 02 Should you roll your own entropy? next up
  3. 03 Verifying entropy mixing instead of trusting it
  4. 04 Seed format: BIP-39, raw BIP-32, or Codex32

A.5What has to survive on a backup

  1. 05The complete material per key: path, script type, fingerprint
  2. 06Passphrase handling and separate storage
  3. 07Does the descriptor need its own backup?

BMinimizing dependency

  1. 08Single-sig vs. multisig, named or by accident
  2. 09Single-vendor vs. multi-vendor multisig
  3. 10Air-gapped signing and transport
  4. 11Physical and geographic redundancy
  5. 12End-to-end verification and rehearsed cold recovery

CContinuity without a new dependency

  1. 13Inheritance
  2. 14Retirement and incapacity
  3. 15Rotation and migration after a compromise

DLiving with it

  1. 16UTXO management and privacy
  2. 17Synthesis: named end-to-end paths

How this works

One new question opens each week. No question has a deadline, so every published node keeps taking answers for as long as the project runs. A reply months from now is still worth having.

Answers are Nostr comments signed with your own key, from a computer or a phone. There is no account and no sign-up, and nobody can edit or delete what sits under your name, including us. New to that, or having trouble? Read how to comment.

Where answers disagree the tree branches, and each branch carries the name of whoever argued for it. Nothing is forced into consensus. Full process in design.md, node status in BACKLOG.md.