Technical Resources
Papers, guides, and tools for going deeper.
Whitepapers
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto
The original 2008 whitepaper that started it all. Nine pages that changed the world. Required reading for anyone serious about understanding Bitcoin from first principles.
Read PDF →Bitcoin Fundamentals
Using Bitcoin as Money
How to send and receive Bitcoin: addresses, the UTXO model, fees, confirmations, and the Lightning Network, and why circulating Bitcoin and supporting Value-for-Value matters.
Read the guide →The Bitcoin Network
How the network actually runs: nodes, the peer-to-peer gossip network, the mempool, proof-of-work mining, block validation, consensus, reorgs, and why running your own node matters.
Read the guide →Keys & Addresses
The cryptography behind owning Bitcoin: private keys, elliptic-curve public keys, hashing to an address, address types, signatures, and HD wallets (seed, derivation paths, and xpubs).
Read the guide →Private Keys
A closer look at the one number that is your Bitcoin: the 256-bit key, entropy and why never to make your own, key formats (hex and WIF), and how a single seed produces them all.
Read the guide →Public Keys
The half you can share: how your public key is derived from the private key on the secp256k1 curve, its formats (compressed, uncompressed, x-only), the one-way trapdoor, and how it verifies your signatures.
Read the guide →Security & Keys
DIY Seed Generation
Roll your own randomness. Generate a Bitcoin seed with dice, convert the rolls to BIP39 words, handle the checksum, and verify the whole chain yourself on an air-gapped machine.
Read the guide →Seed Passphrases
The 25th word: how a passphrase turns one seed into a hidden wallet, decoy wallets for coercion resistance, diceware generation, and the storage rules that keep it from backfiring.
Read the guide →Setting Up a Signing Device
From sealed box (or bag of parts) to trusted signer: sourcing safely, verifying software, loading your seed, pairing air-gapped with Sparrow, and testing before you trust it.
Read the guide →Backup Verification
An untested backup is just a hope. Prove your seed backup restores the right wallet, test passphrase setups, and know exactly what to do when the addresses do not match.
Read the guide →Multisig
No single point of failure: how 2-of-3 wallets survive a lost or stolen key, PSBT signing, quorum choices, and why the wallet descriptor is as important as the seeds.
Read the guide →Miniscript
Spending rules you can read: Bitcoin Script tamed into safe building blocks, timelocks and thresholds, inheritance and treasury policies, and the Taproot privacy that hides them until used.
Read the guide →Privacy
UTXO Management
Coin control in practice: labeling every coin, keeping KYC and non-KYC sources separate, consolidating when fees are low, and freezing dust before it maps your wallet.
Read the guide →CoinJoin
Collaborative transactions with equal outputs make your coins indistinguishable from everyone else's. How anonymity sets work, and the post-mix hygiene that actually preserves the privacy.
Read the guide →PayJoin
Privacy that hides in plain sight: sender and receiver both contribute inputs, chain analysis draws the wrong conclusion, and on-chain the payment looks like any other.
Read the guide →Hardware & Firmware
The Bitcoin Computer
One cheap machine that does only Bitcoin: why a dedicated computer defeats clipboard malware and spyware, the minimal Linux setup with full disk encryption, and the rules that keep it clean.
Read the guide →The Air-Gapped Computer
A machine that cannot go online: pulling the radios, installing everything offline with encryption, moving transactions by QR or microSD, and how it compares to a SeedSigner.
Read the guide →Libreboot
Verify all the way down: replacing proprietary BIOS with fully free boot firmware, what the Intel Management Engine is, what flashing involves, and when it's worth it.
Read the guide →Coreboot
The minimal open-source boot firmware behind Libreboot: staged boot, payloads like SeaBIOS and GRUB, the blobs tradeoff, and wider hardware support.
Read the guide →Nodes & Network
Running a Bitcoin Node
Verify it yourself: the hardware you need, the Bitcoin Core plus Electrum server stack, what the initial sync really takes, Tor, and pointing Sparrow at your own node so nobody watches your wallet but you.
Read the guide →Bonus Projects
Nostr Signing Device
Cold storage for your identity: a $15 ESP32 build that signs your Nostr notes on-device, because an nsec can never be rotated and deserves the same care as a seed.
Read the guide →