Library
Learn this properly, once
Crypto education is mostly people selling you something. These are plain guides to the things that actually cost people money — losing access, buying badly, ignoring liquidity, and forgetting that tax exists. Where we do not know something, we say so.
The library today
- Guides
- 17 written to stay true, not dated posts
- Worksheets
- 11 printable, free and un-gated
- Reading time
- 56 min across the whole library
01 2 guides
Getting started
What a crypto wallet actually is
A wallet does not contain coins. Understanding what it does contain explains almost every rule people tell you to follow, and why they are not arbitrary.
Buying your first crypto without getting fleeced
Where to buy, what the spread really costs you, why the first purchase should be deliberately small, and the checks worth doing before you send money anywhere.
02 3 guides
Keeping it safe
Why a crypto payment cannot be undone
Card payments can be reversed by someone other than you. Crypto payments cannot. That single difference explains most of the rules, and most of the losses.
The five ways people actually lose crypto
Not hacks of the blockchain — losses come from a short, boring, well-documented list, and each one has a specific defence.
What "not your keys, not your coins" actually means
Who legally holds your crypto, why a private key is the whole asset, and how to decide between an exchange and a device you control.
03 4 guides
Researching a coin
How to read the monthly exit-friction index before you trust it
A monthly index scores how hard it actually is to exit each of 63 measured tokens — here's what it measures, what it can't, and where to find your token's number.
What a blockchain actually guarantees — and what it does not
Being on a blockchain proves the ledger was not tampered with. It proves nothing about the project, the team, or whether you will be able to sell.
Can you actually sell it? A short guide to liquidity
The difference between what a holding is worth on paper and what you would receive for it — slippage, depth, sell restrictions, and how to check before you buy.
How to read a coin page without fooling yourself
Market cap, supply, volume and distance from the high — what each number honestly tells you, and the far longer list of things none of them tell you.
05 7 guides
When something goes wrong
Forgotten the passphrase on your seed phrase
The optional “25th word” has no checksum and no length limit, so a wrong guess never fails — it opens a different, empty wallet. What is recoverable depends on what you remember.
The seed phrase checksum, and why your last word is special
Why only 128 words can end a 12-word phrase, why a valid checksum does not prove a phrase is yours, and what the checksum can and cannot catch.
Missing a word from your seed phrase
One missing word is 2,048 candidates in each place it could go. With the checksum and one known address, that is minutes of work — and two missing words is still possible.
Seed phrase words in the wrong order: what can be recovered
Twelve words have 479 million possible orders. That sounds hopeless and is not — but twenty-four scrambled words is a different problem, and it is worth knowing which one you have.
A word on your seed phrase you can’t read
Every word in a standard recovery phrase comes from a fixed list of 2,048, and each is identified by its first four letters. That makes an unreadable word far more solvable than it looks.
How to spot a crypto recovery scam
The second loss is usually larger than the first. The tells are consistent, and they are visible before any money changes hands.
You lost access to a wallet. What can actually be done
An honest triage: which kinds of lost access are genuinely recoverable, which are mathematically not, and what to do first in either case.