Posts
Writing on coercion-resistant Bitcoin self-custody, and on why the community's standing advice makes the problem worse.
Free to read, translate and republish. The papers behind it are open access, the incident data goes upstream to Jameson Lopp's registry, and the analysis scripts are public. Nothing is gated.
The feed
The (F/W)rench Attack
A tax-office database was allegedly queried for people who had declared crypto gains, by an employee under judicial investigation since 2025. Which means the compliant holder gets to choose between an offense and a register that has been mined for targets, and that is what finishes off keeping a low profile as a mechanism.
Obscurity, the Clearest Problem Nobody Talks About
Security through obscurity is condescending before it is anything else: it assumes the person with the wrench is too stupid to read the manual that describes your trick. France has charged 88 people across 12 organized cases as of April 2026, which is networks doing reconnaissance, not opportunists who cannot read.
They Only Took My Pokémon Cards
A Swedish streamer was bound and tortured for hours over bitcoin he said he did not have, and the attackers left with his Pokemon cards. There are three ways to read that denial and the advice comes out worse under all of them, which is the point.
Bloodshed
Take today's wrench-attack numbers and apply them to the maximalist future everyone says they want. Burglaries of occupied homes times the share that end in a death puts England and Wales level with Ukraine's 2025 civilian war deaths. A conditional extrapolation, not a forecast, and every step is shown.
The Balland Case — an Embarrassment to the Self-Custody Creed
A co-founder of Ledger was seized from his home and mutilated. What got him out was an elite police unit and a centralized stablecoin freeze, both of them outside the creed he helped build. The lesson is not that he erred.
The Deadly Race
A partial seizure doesn't leave you half-robbed. It leaves you as the competitor standing between an attacker and the money, and a racer within reach is cheaper to remove than to outrun. The test the argument gives you is blunt: clear success or clear failure, never a race.
Anosognosia
What Alzheimer's, a stroke ward and an 1847 maternity hospital have to do with Bitcoin self-custody. Four mechanisms censor the evidence about hiding your holdings, and the fourth is why publishing the first three changes nothing.
From Magic Internet Money to Gold With Extra Steps
Guarding bitcoin yourself now costs about what a vault costs: roughly 0.55 percent a year for individual holders, on the August registry snapshot, against 0.5 to 1.5 percent for institutional gold storage. If you are already paying vault prices, the dice rolls and the steel plates are a ritual with a price tag.
Does Hiding Your Bitcoin Still Protect You?
Hiding your bitcoin is the standard advice for anyone afraid of being kidnapped over it, and all three parts of it are bets on what the criminal will believe. Brazil records nine kidnappings for every armed robbery, on a small and press-sourced sample.