Bitcoin Assistance — The Index

★ Featured · The Family Vault

The Family Vault.

$500K · 12 chapters

Make sure my family gets the Bitcoin if something happens to me, without trusting any company

"Everything else is handled — the will, the estate, the paperwork. But a significant Bitcoin holding lives in my head and nowhere a lawyer or executor could ever follow. No probate court can hand over a key it doesn't have. Today we close that gap and make it inheritable, properly and on paper."

— David · the afternoon he stopped putting it off

Read the microsite →

★ About ★

Who We Are.

Bitcoin Assistance is a privacy-preserving Bitcoin assistant for people who hold their own keys. It runs locally on the user's own computer, reads the user's own Bitcoin node, and never makes a third-party API call. There is no custodian, no subscription, no surveillance back-end.

The project began as a tool for one family. It is now a library of stories — each one a real Bitcoin task told as a plain-English conversation — backed by capability code that enforces the same trust boundary in every flow. The featured issue is The Family Vault: a fully non-custodial inheritance arrangement — everyday spending, a recovery path for a lost device, and an inheritance path so loved ones are never locked out — verified end-to-end on an emulated hardware wallet.

★ The Non-Negotiables ★

What We Do.

Three rules the code enforces. They define the product.

★ № 01

No signing, ever.

Every signature originates on a human's hardware wallet. The agent is never in the loop between an unsigned transaction and a signed one. The code that would produce a signature simply does not exist in this project.

★ № 02

No third-party APIs.

All Bitcoin data comes from the user's own Bitcoin Core or Electrs. No block-explorer calls, no fee oracles, no exchange APIs. The location of every coin stays inside the user's network. Ever.

★ № 03

Trace data stays local.

Self-hosted observability only. No SaaS observability for traces. Every tool call produces a local audit event and a local trace event. The user can read every line.

If a feature would violate any of the three, the feature is refused. The rules are the architecture.

★ Status ★

What's Shipped.

Honest about what works today and what's still being built.

The Family Vault — an everyday spending wallet for the family, with a separate recovery path if a device is lost and an inheritance path so loved ones are never locked out. Proven start to finish on an emulated hardware wallet.
Plain-English fee guidance — reads the fee market straight from your own node's mempool and tells you what to pay for the speed you actually need. No fee oracle, no third-party estimate.
Check your balance, privately — shows what you hold and which coins it sits in, counted on your own node, so no one anywhere learns that you looked.
A fresh receive address every time — hands you a new address whenever you ask, so your whole payment history doesn't pile onto one public line.
A simple starter wallet — spins up a clean single-key wallet you control end to end: the right tool for everyday amounts before you ever need a vault.
Who's in your vault — keeps a local-only record of the people and roles around your vault. The names and the roles, never the keys.
A plain-English vault explainer — tells you who can spend, what happens next, and when each path unlocks, without a cryptography lecture.
Builds the transaction, then declines to sign it — assembles the full unsigned transaction, every input, output and fee, ready for your hardware. It never signs, and there is no code in it that can.
Coordinates many signers — carries a part-signed transaction between everyone's devices, checks at every hop that nothing changed, combines the pieces, and broadcasts through your own node. It signs none of it.
An inheritance inactivity check — shows you, well ahead of time, whether a simple check-in is due, so a safeguard meant to protect your family never catches you by surprise. It only nudges you here, on your own machine.
An annual vault review — walks through what's changed in your life and flags what the arrangement should rework, and what to take to your attorney. It gives no legal advice.
An inheritance fire-drill on testnet — rehearses the whole inheritance with worthless coins, so the family knows the steps long before the day it is ever real. Your actual vault is never touched.
A backup-location map — records where each split backup share lives. The locations only, never the secret share itself, which it never holds and never reconstructs.

★ Stay Close ★

Two Doors.

Pick the one that fits why you're here.

★ No. 001 Bitcoin Assistance · postage

Postage · Subscriptions

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◆ № 01 · The conversation

Build something with us.

For people setting one up for their own family.

If you're thinking through inheritance, recovery, shared wallets, or any of the open issues — we'd like to hear your situation. Early conversations shape what gets built next.

◆ Start the thread →

✦ № 02 · The infrastructure

Build on top of it.

For hardware vendors, custodians, funds, incubators.

The runtime-agnostic core, wrapper interfaces, and MCP adapter were designed so the same capability code can run inside other products. Separate page for the partnership and investor framing.

✦ For partners →

★ Contact ★

Reach Us.

★ Email hello@plebworks.io

★ Code https://github.com/plebworks/bitcoin-assistance

Mailto is the most reliable way to reach us today. A proper contact form ships with the next issue.