Thomas was paid 7,002 BTC in 2011 for making a video explaining Bitcoin. He put the keys on an encrypted IronKey drive and wrote the password on a piece of paper.
He lost the paper.
The drive allows ten attempts and then erases itself permanently. He has used eight. As of mid 2026 the device was in a Swiss vault and nothing had been recovered.
He did have a plan. The plan was one piece of paper, in one place, with no second path, guarding a device that punishes failure absolutely. The single point of failure was never the encryption.
Everything in this course has been components. This lesson assembles them into the one artifact that matters, and it is the artifact the gate asks you to produce.
The test is simple to state and uncomfortable to pass. Could someone who is not you, who is upset, who is not technical, and who cannot ask you anything, follow this document and recover the funds?
The seven sections
Keep it boring. Boring documents get followed.
1. What exists. Which chains, roughly how much, held in what form (hardware device, metal backup, software wallet, exchange account). Approximate value ranges rather than balances, because balances go stale and this document should not need updating every month.
2. Where everything physically is. The safe, the deposit box and which bank and which branch, the attorney's office, the sibling in another state. Addresses and access instructions for each. Not the contents. The locations.
3. Who to contact, in order. Names, phone numbers, relationship, and what each person holds or knows. If you have used secret splitting, this is the list of who holds a share and how many are needed. If you have not told a shareholder what they are holding, say so here, because otherwise your executor will call someone who has no idea what the conversation is about.
4. The first three steps. Literally numbered. "Open the envelope at the attorney's office. Call the person named inside. Do not attempt anything with the hardware until you have spoken to them." Most recovery failures happen in the first hour, when a panicking person tries something irreversible.
5. What never to do. A short, blunt list. Do not type the recovery words into a website. Do not accept help from anyone who contacts you first. Do not photograph the backup. Do not move funds to an address someone sends you. This section will do more good than any other.
6. Automated systems. Anything from F110-04. What it is, what it will send, roughly when, and confirmation that a message from it is genuine. Without this section your switch fires and your family correctly treats it as a scam.
7. Where the legal documents are. The will or trust, the attorney's contact details, and the confirmation that the executor has authority over digital assets, from F110-02.
Every step needs a second path
This is the lesson the autopsy teaches and it is the one people skip.
Go through your own plan step by step and ask, for each one: if this single thing is gone, does the plan still work?
- The attorney has retired or died. Second path?
- The bank has closed that branch and moved the boxes. Second path?
- The sibling who holds share 3 is not reachable. Threshold still met?
- The house burned down with the safe in it. Second path?
- The device is dead. Is the backup enough on its own?
- The one piece of paper. Second path?
Any step with a single path is where your plan will fail, and it will fail there specifically because that is how these things go. Fixing it is usually cheap: a duplicate stored elsewhere, one more shareholder, a second named contact.
Adding redundancy means adding exposure, so a tighter plan is a safer plan.
True for the secret. False for everything else. Duplicating a seed backup does raise disclosure risk, which is exactly why F110-03 exists: secret splitting lets you add redundancy without adding exposure. But duplicating a location list, a contact name or a set of instructions adds almost no risk at all, and those are the steps that actually break.
Where the document lives
The plan describes where the valuable things are, so it is sensitive but it is not itself a key. That distinction sets the storage rules.
It should be somewhere your family will find without being told, which usually means with the other estate paperwork rather than hidden cleverly. It should exist in at least two places. It should be dated, so the executor knows they have the current version. And it should never contain a seed phrase, a passphrase, a private key, or a full share, because a document that contains those is no longer a plan, it is the asset.
Put a date on it and destroy superseded copies. An undated plan found alongside an older undated plan produces exactly the argument you were trying to prevent, at the worst possible time.
Rehearse it
A plan that has never been executed by its intended reader is not a plan. It is a hypothesis about your own writing.
The lab for this course is deliberately split in two, and the reason is honest. The written plan, F110-L1, is what the Custody Practical requires, because it is something every learner can produce regardless of circumstance. The full drill, F110-L2, where a named heir recovers a test wallet from your document alone while you sit silently in another room, is strongly recommended and not required, because it needs a second consenting person and not everyone has one yet.
If you can do the drill, do it. It is the sibling of the wipe drill in F104, and it fails in the same instructive way: not dramatically, but at some small step you assumed was obvious and turns out not to be. Watching someone get stuck on step 4 of your own document is worth more than any amount of rewriting it alone.
The plan you write this week will be worse than the one you would write in a year, and it will be better than the one that never gets written. Version one can be a single page. Date it, store it, and improve it at the annual review.
Write seven sections: what exists, where it is, who to call, the first three steps, what never to do, which automated systems will contact them, and where the legal documents are. Give every step a second path, because a plan is only as strong as its weakest single-path step, and a lost piece of paper is the most expensive failure in this course. Date it, store two copies with the estate paperwork, put no secrets in it, and get somebody to try it while you say nothing.