About

An honest guide, because we have nothing to sell

Almost every self-custody guide is written by someone with a product in the frame — a hardware brand, a custody service, an exchange, an affiliate payout. This one isn’t.

The pledge

What we believe

Security is something you learn and practise, and there is nothing you can buy that does it for you. No device, no service and no arrangement is safe on its own — what actually keeps Bitcoin is a person who understands their own setup and has rehearsed it. That is why this is a course before it is a set of tools, and why we would rather you understood one setup completely than owned an impressive one you have never tested.

Everything in this section is a judgement rather than a finding, and we would rather say so than have it inferred. Careful people disagree with parts of it. Here is what we think, why we think it, and what would change our minds.

Nothing should depend on one thing being fine

Not one device, not one seed, not one manufacturer, not one clever idea you had at midnight. Anything whose failure takes everything is the arrangement we will steer you away from.

This is about combining independent things, and it is not an argument for multisig. A seed you generated on one device plus a passphrase that device never saw is two independent things. Three keys from three different manufacturers is the same idea done differently. Dice you rolled yourself, feeding a signer that never chose your randomness, is that idea again. What matters is that a single failure — one firmware bug, one bad batch, one company, one mistake — cannot reach all of it at once. A single-signature wallet with a strong passphrase satisfies this. A three-key setup built entirely from one manufacturer does not, whatever it looks like on paper.

The reason this comes first is that the failures which actually reach people are the ones nobody modelled. In 2026 a firmware defect that had sat in public source for five years made a set of Bitcoin seeds guessable. Nobody predicted it — not the audits, not the reproducible builds, not us. Every wallet drained in that incident was a lone key with nothing else that had to also be true, and the people who came through untouched had combined something. You cannot defend against a threat you have not imagined. You can decline to own a component whose failure is total.

The more you are protecting, the more it takes

What counts as adequate depends on what you stand to lose. This is the other half of the same idea, and it is the half most guidance leaves the reader to work out alone. A setup that is entirely sensible for money you are learning with is not automatically sensible for a decade of savings, and the moment to move up is decided by consequence rather than by any quantity of coins.

We ask about consequence, never about amount. Nothing on this site asks what you hold, and nothing ever will. What we ask is what the loss would actually do to you — and the honest answer to that is what should set the shape of your setup. How we weigh risk is the whole method, published.

Simplicity, and where it now sits

The simplest setup that covers you is still the right target, and it is no longer the first thing we say. It used to be. Complexity you do not fully control remains a genuine danger and one of the largest causes of lost Bitcoin — more keys, more devices and more clever schemes have buried more coins than thieves have taken. None of that has stopped being true, and we will still tell you when not to add something as readily as when to.

What changed is which one wins when the two collide. Where the simplest arrangement would leave one thing holding everything, the simplicity argument loses. We would rather walk you through something with one more moving part than sell you the elegance of a setup with a single throat to choke.

That is a change of position, and it is worth being plain about why. Most of the guidance this field rests on was written for a world where attacks were expensive, hand-made and rare. They are now cheap, automated, and increasingly assembled by machines that read code faster and more patiently than any auditor. A shortcut that is merely risky today is the one found at scale tomorrow. We do not think the older, simplicity-first advice was wrong when it was written — we think it is no longer sufficient on its own, and we would rather move early and be accused of caution than move late.

What we will not do is recommend an arrangement whose single failure would cost you everything and then call it adequate because it is tidy. If we point you at something simple, it is because we believe it holds — not because it reads well. The one place we still recommend a setup resting on a single seed is money whose loss would not change your life, and there the finder says so in plain words rather than letting you find out later.

So the test we apply to any recommendation is not is this safe now. It is: is this still standing in ten years, operated by a real person having a bad week?

Where the rules come in

The twelve rules are how all of the above turns into something you can actually follow. They are the first thing the course teaches, they take two minutes to read, and every lesson after that exists to explain one of them in full. They are an expression of the philosophy above rather than a substitute for it — and the order of that list is itself the ranking. rule 02 is the floor: Protect your Bitcoin with at least two independent things, so no single one of them failing can lose it. rule 05 is the target: Choose the simplest setup that covers you. Where the two collide, the floor wins — which is why one sits near the top of the list and the other does not.

We’re confidently pro-self-custody. Holding your own keys is a skill worth learning, and the risks are manageable once you can name them. But this is your money and your responsibility — nothing here is financial or legal advice, and you should never act on a step you don’t understand. When something is safety-critical, we say so loudly.

Who’s behind it

BitcoinKeys.guide is a RadVladdy project — one of a small family of independent Bitcoin sites published under that name. What matters here is whether the advice is right, which is why every page carries the date it was last checked and every claim is one you can go and verify yourself.

You can take this material and use it. The whole site is open source: the code is MIT, and the lessons, ratings and diagrams are CC BY 4.0 — copy them, translate them, teach from them, feed them to a model. The one condition is credit and a link back, and that condition is here for your reader's sake rather than ours: self-custody advice goes stale, every page here carries the date it was last checked, and the link is how someone reading a copy finds the version that still is.

Where the material comes from

The guidance is distilled from the strongest practitioner sources in the field — Jameson Lopp’s two decades of security work, Blockchain Commons’ Smart Custody framework, and the published operational guidance from Unchained, Nunchuk, and others — then re-checked and written in plain English. Where those sources disagree, we say so rather than pretending there’s one answer.