This is the third post in a series about SMSF Bitcoin audit evidence. The first post covered what auditors need to verify. The second post compared evidence standards. This post covers the regulatory pressure that is making all of this urgent. Self-custody is the right call. No counterparty risk, no exchange insolvency exposure, your keys, your coins. Most serious bitcoiners wouldn’t have it any other way. But the Australian government is tightening the screws on how SMSF crypto holdings are audited, and if you can’t prove what you hold, your auditor has no choice but to qualify your audit and report you to the ATO. ...

Key Ceremony is a free tool for documenting your Bitcoin multisig wallet setup. You record who holds each key, where devices and backups are stored, and how to recover. It generates a professional ceremony record as a PDF. That’s it. Getting to that simplicity took some work. Origin The idea came from Dale Warburton’s Bitcoin self-custody quiz. Taking it highlighted real gaps in my own setup. Not in the keys themselves, but in the documentation around them. I knew where my keys were. I hadn’t written down how someone else would find and use them if I couldn’t. ...

This is the second post in a series about SMSF Bitcoin audit evidence. The first post, Your SMSF Holds Bitcoin — What Does Your Auditor Actually Need?, covered what auditors need to verify and why most of what trustees currently provide falls short. This post goes deeper into the evidence itself — what makes some forms of evidence stronger than others, and why it matters. Auditing is fundamentally about evidence. An auditor’s job is to assess whether the evidence supporting a claim is sufficient and appropriate. For most financial assets, this is well-trodden ground. Bank statements, share registries, property titles — each comes from a recognised institution with its own governance and reporting obligations. The auditor evaluates the source, assesses the risk, and forms a conclusion. ...

Ask a contractor what they’ve worked on in the last year and you’ll get a vague answer. Something like “infrastructure, some web stuff, bit of everything really.” Ask me and I’ll give you a categorised breakdown of 489 logged tasks across 560 hours — because I tracked all of it. Why Track at This Level I use Kimai, an open-source time tracker I self-host. Every task gets a description. Not “did some work” — an actual note. Migrated LND wallet to new channel database. Configured Caddy reverse proxy with mTLS passthrough. Wrote Python script to reconcile UTXO set against xpub descriptors. That kind of thing. ...

The Bitcoin-backed lending market is growing. Products that let you deposit BTC as collateral and receive fiat or stablecoins — without selling, without triggering capital gains, while maintaining upside exposure — are increasingly common. But how do you know if the interest rate you’re being offered is fair? I think the answer is hiding in plain sight in the futures market. And it leads to a thought experiment that I find genuinely uncomfortable. ...

I run a Bitcoin Lightning node called WinThistle. A few days ago I noticed my channel to mineracks had gone inactive. I knew something was wrong but hadn’t had a chance to dig into it. So I asked Claude Code. What happened next was a masterclass in iterative problem-solving — not because Claude knew the answer immediately, but because it didn’t, and that turned out not to matter. The Problem My channel to mineracks was showing active: false. Payments couldn’t route through it. I had 882,000 sats of liquidity sitting idle. ...

I’ve been learning tin whistle online through Conor Lamb’s Tin Whistle Workshops. Conor is a member of Realta and last week he led the class through “The Fermanagh Highland”. He also accepts bitcoin on lightning for payment, which is a nice bonus. The class materials include a PDF of the sheet music. I wanted to get that into a format I could manipulate – add chords, strum patterns, and eventually record myself playing along. I fed the PDF to Claude Code (Anthropic’s AI coding assistant) and asked it to transcribe the notation into LilyPond markup. LilyPond is a text-based music engraving system – like LaTeX for sheet music. You describe music in a markup language and it produces publication-quality scores. ...

If you use Seafile and you’ve tried working with a git repo or an Obsidian vault on a SeaDrive-mounted library, you’ve probably noticed things going wrong. Slow operations, missing files, sync conflicts. The kind of problems that don’t surface immediately but erode your trust in the setup over time. The issue isn’t Seafile. It’s SeaDrive specifically, and understanding why will save you a lot of debugging. The Problem SeaDrive is a virtual drive. Files aren’t stored locally — they’re fetched on demand when you access them. For browsing documents, opening the occasional spreadsheet, or pulling up reference material, this is great. It saves disk space and works transparently. ...

My LNbits instance stopped working. No config changes, no updates I’d triggered intentionally. Just VoidWallet errors where there used to be a functioning Lightning wallet. The fix took an embarrassingly long time to find, not because it was complicated, but because the failure mode was completely misleading. If you’re running LNbits in Docker with the Admin UI enabled, this will probably bite you too. The Symptom LNbits was falling back to VoidWallet on every startup: ...

If your self-managed super fund holds Bitcoin in self-custody, you will eventually have a conversation with your auditor that goes something like this: “Can you provide evidence of the fund’s Bitcoin holdings?” What happens next depends on whether you’re holding on an exchange or in your own wallet. If you’re on an exchange, this is straightforward — the exchange issues a statement, the auditor files it, everyone moves on. The auditor may not love that your super fund holds Bitcoin, but at least the evidence trail looks like something they’re used to. ...