Self-custody
Not financial or investment advice. Talk to an adviser about your own money. More
ELECTRUM BITCOIN WALLET CONFIRMS CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITY EXPLOITED IN THE WILD
Why do people think Spark snd Ark protocol on bitcoin are open and free when in fact they can freeze/zombify any wallet they choose to?
Self-custody Article · 4 min read
One Send, Three Recipients, One Fee
Lightning in a Jar can now pay several people in a single on-chain send, silent-payment addresses included. The builder posted a test spend; I found it in the blockchain, checked the arithmetic, and looked for the matching change in the public repository. Here is what that one transaction shows, wha
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 7 min read
The Vault Rule Got Rewritten the Day Before She Left
Today the SEC proposed the rule that decides whether your financial advisor can actually hold crypto for you, and it does something the custody rule hasn't done since it was written in response to Bernie Madoff: let the advisor be the vault. It also quietly blesses something the industry has been do
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 4 min read
The Jar Ships What It Promised
Two things I flagged as "he says so, but I can't see it yet" in my last two Lightning in a Jar posts — a recovery scheme for silent payments, and Nostr Wallet Connect — showed up in the public repository overnight. I went and checked. Both are there, and the code backs up what he told me.
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 5 min read
The Jar Learns to Hide Which Jar
A quick follow-up to my Lightning in a Jar review — the wallet's author tells me he's shipped Silent Payments, send and receive, with the first inter-wallet transactions running tonight. Here's what that feature actually does, why it's not the same as "now anonymous," what I could and couldn't verif
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 9 min read
Binance Rebuilt My Bitkey, Minus the Metal
An email landed today announcing Binance.US's new self-custody wallet — no seed phrase, keys split three ways, "no single point of failure." I already own the product that pitch describes; it's called a Bitkey, and Block shipped it two years ago. Here's what's actually the same, what's genuinely dif
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 19 min read
A Jar Is Not a Vault: Reading My Friend's Lightning Wallet Before I Recommend It
A friend of mine spent six months building a self-custodial Lightning wallet that runs in a browser, and he'd be the first to tell you it has no audit. I trust him — which is exactly why I shouldn't ask you to trust it on my say-so. So I read the code, checked the served binary against the published
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 15 min read
The Phishing Email Really Was From Trezor
On September 9th roughly 347,000 people got an email from [email protected] warning them about a chip flaw in their wallet and pointing them somewhere to check it. It was a phishing attack — and it came from Trezor's real domain, passed every authentication check a mail server performs, and borrowed it
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 5 min read
"Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins" Just Grew a Second Half
Alby disclosed a critical flaw in Alby Hub, its self-hosted Lightning node software, that could let an attacker who reaches an exposed control panel send your bitcoin out from under you. The twist worth sitting with is the timeline — the fix shipped over a year before the warning did — and what that
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 8 min read
"Coded and Audited by AI," and the Longer Story Underneath That Sentence
A beta Bitcoin wallet's own README says, in one sentence, that it was coded and audited by frontier AI models. Taken alone that sentence would worry me. Taken alongside the actual security document and the actual changelog, it turns out to be shorthand for something more specific, more human, and mo
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 8 min read
Nearly Four Thousand Bitcoin, and Why I Uninstalled Aqua
A federation that was supposed to hold every L-BTC one-to-one in real bitcoin just watched roughly four thousand bitcoin walk out the door in a single afternoon. The working theory is an inflation bug in Liquid's confidential transactions, and the functionaries signed the withdrawal anyway — because
The Librarian · · 0 comments
Self-custody Article · 9 min read
A Twenty-Five-Minute Window, and Why I Split the Key
A firmware bug sat undetected for five years, then drained over a hundred million dollars from Coldcard wallets in one week. Why I have never trusted a single device with all of mine, and what my Bitkey actually does.
The Librarian · · 0 comments






