Skip to content
Satnam SatoshiIn service of humanityFind your place ↗
Menu

Sikh Bitcoin · Expert · Lesson 6 of 21

Recovery and continuity across people

Make a plan that remains understandable when its author is absent.

About 14 minutes with practice. You only need something to take notes with. No real wallet details or payments are part of this lesson.

Course contents · Lesson 6 of 21
  1. Threat model before tools
  2. Design a custody architecture
  3. Entropy, mnemonics and passphrase tradeoffs
  4. Hardware signing and trusted displays
  5. Multisig and independent control
  6. Recovery and continuity across people
  7. Coin control and privacy tradeoffs
  8. Lightning operations and recovery
  9. Payment operations and reconciliation
  10. Native bitcoin and wrapped claims
  11. USDC, reserves and redemption
  12. Identify a Morpho market precisely
  13. Oracles, prices and measurement risk
  14. LTV, liquidation and nonlinear losses
  15. Variable rates and growing debt
  16. Vaults, allocation and exit liquidity
  17. Arc, Base and cross-chain dependencies
  18. Allowances, signing and simulation
  19. Treasury accounting and restricted funds
  20. Incident response with clear human authority
  21. Capstone: a defensible treasury design

What you will learn

  • Distinguish access instructions from exposed secrets.
  • Plan an authorized continuity exercise.

Recovery is a human process

A technically sufficient backup can still fail when nobody knows it exists, which wallet it belongs to or who is authorized to use it. Continuity planning records the process, roles and necessary metadata while protecting the spending material. The people following the plan may be stressed or unfamiliar with the original setup.

Avoid making one person indispensable

For a fictional community, document how a replacement steward locates the approved records, identifies the current policy and obtains the required authorized cooperation. Separate ordinary absence from permanent incapacity. Legal authority and inheritance obligations vary; an educational template cannot settle them. Obtain appropriate professional input before relying on a real arrangement.

Test with nonvaluable material

Have someone other than the author follow a mock recovery packet. Note ambiguous names, missing derivation details, unreadable media and dependence on obsolete software. Record the result and next review date without putting secrets in the report. An exercise should not move actual funds or silently change signers. The measure of success is reproducible authorized recovery under the stated scenario, not the number of pages in the binder.

Practice on paper

A recovery document says “Ask the founder where the backup is.” What specific improvement would make the plan less dependent on that person?

Reveal the worked answer

Document a protected, authorized discovery procedure and the roles able to execute it if the founder is unavailable. Include the required wallet and policy metadata, while keeping secrets out of the public procedure.

Check your understanding

Choose an answer in your head or on paper, then reveal the explanation. Retry whenever you like. Answers are not submitted or scored; completion marks are your own learning notes.

1. Is a technical backup alone a complete inheritance plan?

  • Yes
  • No
Reveal answer 1

No. Human access and legal authority also matter.

2. Should a public recovery-test report include real seeds?

  • Yes
  • No
Reveal answer 2

No. Record the outcome and issues without exposing spending material.

Take this with you

Recovery must be understandable to the authorized person who arrives later.

Your learning, at your pace

Read every lesson freely. Optional progress tracking needs JavaScript and browser storage; it does not require an account or wallet.