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Blockchain Commons SmartCustody Book

by Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline

The first SmartCustody Book focuses on a risk-modeling exercise, which teaches digital-asset holders to itemize their assets, assess vulnerabilities, and resolve those problems. It does so using the foundation of a robust 14-step cold storage self-custody scenario and a set of 27 personified adversaries who may be trying to steal your digital goods. Though this first book is focused on a self-custodian scenario, it also discusses fiduciary duties and demonstrates how the risk-modeling exercise may be used for the more complex scenario of a family fund. Future SmartCustody releases will expand on dual-control, multisignatures, and other SmartCustody technologies required for custodianship models of that sort.

Additional Information

The following files contain more information:

  • v1.01 of the SmartCustody Book as a PDF
  • Manuscript Pages for PDF generation for the SmartCustody Book
  • TODO featuring a Table of Contents for v2.0 of the #SmartCustody book; support us to help make it happen

Status - First Release 2019-09-16

This is the first pubic release of SmartCustody Book. The is still currently under active development for future minor releases and major editions.

Roadmap

See v2.0 Table of Contents.

Disclaimer

The information included in this repository and its derivatives are intended to inform a set of best practices. It may not address risks specific to your situation, and if it does not, you should modify appropriately. While this information may inform best practices, there is no guarantee that following this advice will sufficiently ensure the security of your digital assets. In addition, this information is only a window on best practices at a specific moment in time. Be aware that the Bitcoin & blockchain ecosystems may have evolved and the risk assessments of specific products may have changed since the publication of this draft. In other words: be cautious, be careful, and be aware of the current Bitcoin & blockchain landscape before you use this information.

Origin, Authors, Copyright & Licenses

Unless otherwise noted (either in this /README.md or in the file's header comments) the contents of this repository are Copyright © 2020 by Blockchain Commons, LLC, and are licensed under the CC-BY-SA license from Creative Commons.

In most cases, the authors, copyright, and license for each file reside in header comments in the source code. When it does not, we have attempted to attribute it accurately in the table below.

Derived from…

This SmartCustody Book project is either derived from or was inspired by:

  • #SmartCustody — Early drafts of these materials were written by Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline, and were (c) 2018-2019 by Christopher Allen. All rights to these works transferred to Blockchain Commmons, LLC on September 16, 2019.

  • #SmartCustody White Papers — Repo containing some of the original texts used in this book, by the same authors, and under the same license.

Financial Support

The SmartCustody Book is a project of Blockchain Commons. We are proudly a "not-for-profit" social benefit corporation committed to open source & open development. Our work is funded entirely by donations and collaborative partnerships with people like you. Every contribution will be spent on building open tools, technologies, and techniques that sustain and advance blockchain and internet security infrastructure and promote an open web.

To financially support further development of SmartCustody Book and other projects, please consider becoming a Patron of Blockchain Commons through ongoing monthly patronage as a GitHub Sponsor. You can also support Blockchain Commons with bitcoins at our BTCPay Server.

Contributing

We encourage public contributions through issues and pull requests! Please review CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our development process. All contributions to this repository require a GPG signed Contributor License Agreement.

Discussions

The best place to talk about Blockchain Commons and its projects is in our GitHub Discussions areas.

Blockchain Commons Discussions. For developers, interns, and patrons of Blockchain Commons, please use the discussions area of the Community repo to talk about general Blockchain Commons issues, the intern program, or topics other than those covered by the Gordian Developer Community or the Gordian User Community.

Other Questions & Problems

As an open-source, open-development community, Blockchain Commons does not have the resources to provide direct support of our projects. Please consider the discussions area as a locale where you might get answers to questions. Alternatively, please use this repository's issues feature. Unfortunately, we can not make any promises on response time.

If your company requires support to use our projects, please feel free to contact us directly about options. We may be able to offer you a contract for support from one of our contributors, or we might be able to point you to another entity who can offer the contractual support that you need.

Credits

The following people directly contributed to this repository. You can add your name here by getting involved. The first step is learning how to contribute from our CONTRIBUTING.md documentation.

Name Role Github Email GPG Fingerprint
Christopher Allen Principal Architect @ChristopherA <ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com> FDFE 14A5 4ECB 30FC 5D22 74EF F8D3 6C91 3574 05ED
Shannon Appelcline Co-Author @shannona <shannon.appelcline@gmail.com> 7EC6 B928 606F 27AD

Responsible Disclosure

We want to keep all of our software safe for everyone. If you have discovered a security vulnerability, we appreciate your help in disclosing it to us in a responsible manner. We are unfortunately not able to offer bug bounties at this time.

We do ask that you offer us good faith and use best efforts not to leak information or harm any user, their data, or our developer community. Please give us a reasonable amount of time to fix the issue before you publish it. Do not defraud our users or us in the process of discovery. We promise not to bring legal action against researchers who point out a problem provided they do their best to follow the these guidelines.

Reporting a Vulnerability

Please report suspected security vulnerabilities in private via email to ChristopherA@BlockchainCommons.com (do not use this email for support). Please do NOT create publicly viewable issues for suspected security vulnerabilities.

The following keys may be used to communicate sensitive information to developers:

Name Fingerprint
Christopher Allen FDFE 14A5 4ECB 30FC 5D22 74EF F8D3 6C91 3574 05ED

You can import a key by running the following command with that individual’s fingerprint: gpg --recv-keys "<fingerprint>" Ensure that you put quotes around fingerprints that contain spaces.