Great Wall — the course

Five live sessions on coercion-resistant self-custody. Every one ends at a keyboard. The materials are free and already published; what you pay for is the room.

This is a pilot. Its first job isn't to be complete, it's to be run, watched and corrected. The textbook and slides are version-0 drafts, and the first cohort helps debug them. If that sounds like a reason to wait for cohort 2, it probably is. If it sounds interesting, it's the most influence over the material you will ever have.

The five sessions

About 90 minutes live, plus 30–60 minutes of hands-on homework between each.

  1. The Wrench in the Works. Why conventional self-custody isn't enough. You leave with your own threat profile sketched, and the viewer installed.
  2. Secrets You Cannot Tell. What kind of secret survives coercion. You decode a fractal point by hand and feel what "tacit" means.
  3. Drawing Inside the Labyrinth. How a seed becomes a point on a fractal. You encode and round-trip a mini-seed.
  4. Building the Wall. What stops an attacker, or you, from rushing. You run the Argon2 chain and calibrate a delay.
  5. Living With It. How "trust your memory" is made responsible. A full setup run: train, accelerate, inherit.

Who it's for

Assumed: you know what a seed phrase is, roughly what hashing and public-key signatures do, and you can install software and use a terminal a bit.

Not assumed: cryptography, fractal geometry, Rust, Python, information theory. Each of those is introduced from zero at the point you first need it, with the deeper version in optional boxes you can skip and still keep up.

Cohorts are 6 to 12 people. That's small on purpose — the pair work, the explain-it-back exercises and the feedback only work if the room is small enough that nobody can hide in it.

Never with real funds

The course teaches a real setup using test entropy only. Never a real seed, never real money, not even to demonstrate. This isn't caution theatre: the Great Wall implementation is a prototype, and session 5 ends by asking you outright whether you'd trust real funds to it yet. "No" is a perfectly good answer and several people will give it.

When that changes it will be written down, with a date, in DELIVERED.md.

What costs money, and what doesn't

The textbook, the slides, the syllabus and the feedback instruments are free and public, in the research repository. Read the whole thing before deciding whether the live version is worth anything to you. That's the point of publishing it.

The software stays free too. Great Wall, BTC-D20, BIP-450 and the papers are MIT or Apache-2.0: no "pro" version, no feature behind a payment, no queue for donors. What is sold here is time — five live sessions with the person who designed the protocol, answering your questions about your setup, in a room small enough to ask them.

The joining community is free. Cohort dates and cost are worked out there, with the people who want to be in one.

Joining

First cohort forming. 6–12 seats.

Join the Discord

Free to join, no fee, no application. Read the house rules before you post — the first one is there for a reason that this course is largely about.

Prefer email? yuri@t3infosecurity.com

House rules

A room full of people learning to protect their bitcoin is, viewed from outside, a list of people who hold bitcoin. My own papers are about how target lists get built out of records nobody meant to create. I'm not going to host one.

  1. Never post amounts, balances, addresses, or where you live. Not yours, not approximately, not as a joke. If a question can only be answered by saying what you hold, it's the wrong question and I'll say so.
  2. Pseudonyms are welcome. No real name is ever required, by me or by anyone else. Nobody gets to ask.
  3. Screenshots: test setups only. Post fractals freely — but from practice entropy, never from a region you intend to use. Your region is part of your secret.
  4. I will never DM you first. Not to offer help, not about payment, not ever. Anyone who does is not me. Report it and I'll ban them.
  5. No trading, no referrals, no "I can recover your wallet". Instant removal, no discussion.
  6. Disagreement is the point. Session 5 asks you to critique the system and name what would stop you trusting it. Do that in the channels too. The pilot's most valuable output is being told where it's wrong.