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

"If my plane goes down, my wife can't reach it. I've been putting this off for two years. We're going to fix it today."

— 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.