Welcome to Advanced Bitcoin Security & Privacy
By now you can hold your own keys, run your own node and check your own transactions. This final course is about defending what you’ve built: keeping your coins and your connection private, making sure the software you run is the real thing, and keeping your savings safe from loss, theft and coercion, for your lifetime and your heirs’. It teaches habits and checks you can keep up for decades, not one product.
Who this course is for
Anyone who already holds bitcoin in a wallet of their own and wants to protect it properly. It builds on Courses 2 and 4: you should be comfortable with hardware wallets, seed phrases and the optional passphrase, and ideally run a full node with Sparrow or Electrum connected to it. If those are new, start with Course 2: Bitcoin Wallets & Self-Custody and Course 4: Lightning Network & Bitcoin Nodes. Every term is explained the first time it appears.
What you’ll learn
- How you’re tracked, and the everyday fix (Lessons 5.1 and 5.2): how chain analysis links addresses to people, how to work out your own threat model, and coin control: labelling your coins and choosing them by hand.
- Your software and your connection (Lessons 5.3 and 5.4): checking signatures and checksums before you install anything, and putting your wallet and node on Tor, including what a VPN does and doesn’t hide.
- Private coins (Lessons 5.5 and 5.6): buying bitcoin without handing over your ID, how CoinJoin breaks links that already exist and which tools still do it, and how PayJoin adds privacy to an ordinary payment.
- Keeping it safe for life (Lessons 5.7 to 5.10): 2-of-3 multisig from the idea to Sparrow, Nunchuk, Casa and Unchained, an inheritance plan your family can carry out, and physical security against theft and coercion.
Lesson 5.11 puts everything from all five courses into one sovereignty plan: a checklist in order of priority, a scorecard and a maintenance rhythm, with ten questions to check your understanding.
How to take it
Take the lessons in order: each builds on the ones before, and from Lesson 5.3 on you’ll know how to check every download the later lessons ask for. Several lessons are hands-on: you’ll verify a real release, move your node and wallet onto Tor and walk through a 2-of-3 setup in Sparrow, so keep your hardware wallet, and your node if you run one, at hand. Every lesson ends with questions to check your understanding.
Privacy tools change fast. Samourai Wallet’s servers were seized in April 2024, zkSNACKs switched off Wasabi’s original coordinator in June 2024, and the original JoinMarket software was archived in April 2026, so the lessons date every tool and price they name. Check that a tool is still maintained and trustworthy before you move real funds with it.
