I’ve been involved with crypto for 10+ years, mostly focusing on self-custody and secure storage.
Earlier this year, because of an upcoming surgery, I created detailed step-by-step guides for my completely non-technical family so they could access my Bitcoin and other crypto wallets if necessary, starting from absolute zero, including wallet creation and all the basics.
Those are every good guides not only for beginners but also for people already in the industry but does not know how to go about many things. This was a thoughtful move that you have been working on, it doesn't seem to be motivated by your surgery only.
If I may ask, assuming there was no case of surgery for you, you wouldn't have thought your family about all these?
If your surgery is very successful, what happens next? Will you retrieve their access or you'll just continue life feeling compromised.
Thank you too for taking the time to check the site. I know it is not easy, because I only linked the homepage, it has a lot of text, you have to find the guides, and then you also have to spend time looking through them. All this from a random unknown person who just posted a link in a forum.
I will try to quickly summarize how this guide started:
By “my family”, I mainly mean my wife. My wife and I started with crypto together 10+ years ago. More exactly, I told her I was going to buy Bitcoin, and she said OK. She did not care about the topic. So she has known about it from the beginning, but she was never interested in it. For years I asked her to sit down with me so I could explain what she should do if something happened to me, but she always said “later, later, later”.
When this surgery came up earlier this year, I thought that because of the lack of her interest, I would probably not be able to explain everything properly in a way that she would actually learn it. So I started making one big messy guide in Word.
I have never worked officially as a web developer, but I have been interested in websites as a hobby for about 10 years, and it was also useful for my own business because I made my own website. So I thought I would put the guide on a non-public subpage of my business website. That way it would be easier to keep, and I would only need to give one link to my wife.
After I made the first messy Tails-based guide page, I thought it should also have a table of contents. Then, just for my own fun, I added a progress bar. And when those things came together, I realized that the information might be useful enough to share with others too. So I registered blockchainheritage.com, adjusted the content around a proper homepage, wrote an introduction for the guide, and also made a Windows-based guide so that I do not scare away complete beginners immediately.
About a week ago I posted it in a crypto Telegram group in my own country. Not many people cared, but one person became quite interested and suggested that I put the chapters under chevrons and make the design a bit more modern. He even sent me a CSS file showing what kind of changes he meant. Also just for my own fun, I changed the progress system so there is not only one progress bar for the whole page, but separate progress for sections and subsections too.
And basically that is all. The website is much simpler than it looks. My goal was, and still is, to give my own wife a reliable source, so she does not have to search randomly and trust strangers. She is a complete beginner in this topic, she is a surgeon, and she is not interested in crypto.
So yes, I did want to pass this knowledge to my family for years, but even now, despite the surgery, they are still not really interested. That is why the website was born more out of necessity than anything else.
There is also no real access that I would need to take back from my wife after the surgery, because if she had wanted to access it before, she could already have done that.
The fact that I am not primarily making this for the public also means that I will finish the guides even if nobody else cares about them. I did not create this as a “success project”.
Actually, the Bitcoin guide will probably be the least useful one compared to the others, because it is the simplest. With a basic Tails installation, everything needed is already available. For Monero, you also need to install an extra application. For Ethereum, you even need to start a local server on Tails. But all of this is still quite simple if someone explains step by step what to do. It just took me many days to figure these things out earlier, even though I basically come from an IT-related background.
Also, in the current AI world, it is very easy to verify content. A visitor can easily check whether what they are reading is a scam or not. In fact, I also suggest on the website that people should not trust me blindly, but should use official documentation and even AI as a secondary review tool to verify the content.
