Chapter 0: Introduction
Why TF do we need this book?
Most bitcoin books come in two categories.
- Bitcoin is the best investment since sliced gold.
- Bitcoin philosophy
As far as I know, there is not a book that teaches the average person how to take self-custody of their bitcoin. There are many guides, webpages, and YouTube videos, but they are kind of fragmented and require you to take many detours down the rabbit hole. This book is for people who have embroiled themselves in bitcoin. Maybe they read the Bitcoin Standard or the Progressive Case for Bitcoin and have decided they need some bitcoin. They think bitcoin is energy, digital gold, Venice, "the blockchain," proof-of-work, and 12 magic words you memorize and say to retrieve all of your wealth like Wingaudiam Levinosa in Harry Potter.
There are no more bitcoin books to be written. This is not a bitcoin book. It is a compilation of many different tools I have found and used since I got into bitcon. This book will not have any charts. It will not mention the price of bitcoin. The only model is tick-tock-next block. The world will never have 21 million bitcoin. This book will teach you how to control a small fraction of that amount. As long as you can write down 24 words and a passphrase and can store them safely, you will be able to store your bitcoin. You will have your Cold Card memorize your words.
This book will not teach you:
"How much will I get if I invest $100 in Bitcoin?
"When Moon?"
"How much does it cost to buy one Bitcoin?"
This book will not teach you how to lend your bitcoin or give it to someone else for interest." This is anti-Block-Fi. This book will not teach you how to buy bitcoin from a regulated exchange. Regulated exchanges are some of the most dangerous ways to store your bitcoin. The worst way to store bitcoin is in someone else's wallet. The bitcoin you hold in someone else's wallet is someone else's bitcoin. **This is not a book about other people's bitcoin. This is not about Blackrock's bitcoin, Coinbase's bitcoin, or Strike's bitcoin. This is about your bitcoin. Your bitcoin is your responsibility. ** If you lose your seeds, nothing in this book can help you. ** If you write your passphrase down wrong, you will hodl forever. This book will teach you how to double-check your wallets and do it as easily as possible while having bitcoin IOUs for as little time and as private as we reasonably can expect our privacy to be.
I went to my first bitcoin conference in November of 2020, in the midst of the FTX scam being revealed in real time. FTX was the most regulated of the regulated exchanges. They still stole their customers bitcoin. I didn't speak to anyone at the conference who would admit they kept their bitcoin on FTX, but many people said they kept it on a bitcoin-only exchange. This exchange regularly informs their customers that they need to withdraw. They make it very easy. Yet so many people trust the exchanges more than they trust themselves.
I found this surprising because the second line in the bitcoin white paper is very clear about this.
Satoshi Nakamoto said this in February 2009 on the Peer2Peer Foundation:
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I decided to write this book for these people to show them they do not need to trust themselves. They can trust the math instead. They can ditch their bitcoin IOUs for real UTXOs. What's a UTXO? an unspent bitcoin transaction output. That's just a fancy way of saying saving bitcoin or stacking sats.
This book is not a 100% trustless way to store bitcoin. That would be the hard way, but I do believe this is possible to achieve, especially if you only use bitcoin on the main chain, but that is beyond the scope of this book. I intend to teach you how to use your bitcoin. If you don't have any bitcoin, don't worry. I will teach you how to get some using bitcoin the way it was meant to be, **peer2peer. **
When you buy bitcoin peer2peer, you know you own bitcoin as soon as it gets to your wallet. This will protect you from exchanges that are regulated by a corrupt financial system that knows how to regulate fractional reserve banks that blow up but has no idea how cryptography works. For this reason, many bitcoiners have fallen victim to scams they thought were safe becauuse of financial regulation that keeps them as safe as the credit ratings of sub-prime mortgages, which means not very safe at all. There are many examples of regulated and unregulated exchanges and lending platforms that were hacked, rehypoticated, or just plain stolen. This book intends to teach you how to protect yourself from unscrupulous exchanges that look legit because of regulation, but are actually rug-pull technology such as:
-FTX
-Celcius
-Block-Fi
-Mt. Gox