THE SITUATION ROOM · CUSTODY SCHOOL
The Vault School
The practice of holding your own — because more coins die of bad custody than are ever stolen by clever attackers.
Where the Cipher School teaches how the machine works, this school teaches how to live with it safely for decades: choosing hardware you can verify, recording a seed that survives fire and forgetting, taking the passphrase trade deliberately, and — in the wings ahead — airgapped signing, your own node, multisig quorums, and the estate planning that makes the coins outlive you. Modules carry printable field documents, because custody work happens away from screens, and every module ends with a field test.
The curriculum
10 MODULES
Foundations
4 MODULES
The decisions everything else stands on. Why keys beat IOUs, a signer you can verify rather than trust, the seed and the steel that outlives the device, and the passphrase trade taken with open eyes.
The Practice
3 MODULES
Custody as a working discipline: signatures that never touch a connected machine, a node that verifies your own chain, and multisig quorums with no single point of failure.
The Estate
3 MODULES
The long game: the twelve documented ways holders actually lose coins, the inheritance plan that makes the coins outlive you, and the annual review that keeps the whole arrangement honest.
The field documents
5 PRINTABLE · A4
Checklists, worksheets and field notes to print, mark up, and keep with your custody records — seeds and succession plans belong on paper, not screens. Printing one asks for a free account; the modules themselves need none.
ENTRY · FOUNDATIONS
The Self-Custody Starter Checklist.
The complete first-time sequence, in order — from empty drawer to a tested, recoverable vault.
PRINT / DOWNLOAD
SOVEREIGNTY · THE PRACTICE
The First-Time Node Runner.
Verify your own chain: a working full node, from empty hardware to a wallet that asks no one's permission.
PRINT / DOWNLOAD
SCALE · THE PRACTICE
The Multisig Quorum Primer.
M-of-N custody without the mystique — what a quorum buys you, and what it will cost to run.
PRINT / DOWNLOAD
FIELD NOTE · THE ESTATE
Twelve Ways Holders Lose Bitcoin.
The documented failure modes — most coins die of these, not of clever cryptography.
PRINT / DOWNLOAD
SUCCESSION · THE ESTATE
The Bitcoin Inheritance Worksheet.
Fill this in by hand, seal it with your will, and rehearse it once — so the coins outlive you.
PRINT / DOWNLOAD