Defending Bitcoin

Bitcoin secures over a trillion dollars in value. It has no security team.

Defending Bitcoin applies the same frameworks that protect power grids and pipelines to Bitcoin, the world’s first decentralized critical infrastructure. There is no Bitcoin CISO, no incident response team, and no central authority to call when things break. From custodial failures to quantum computing, the full threat landscape is here. So are the layered defenses, drawn from industrial standards including IEC 62443, with practical steps you can take today.

Inside the book:

Exchange failures and custodial collapse. What FTX, Mt. Gox, and Celsius taught us, and how to evaluate counterparty risk before it matters.
Self-custody, private key security, and inheritance planning. Hardware wallets, multisig, seed phrase storage, and how to make sure your stack survives you.
Privacy, physical security, and operational discipline. The doxxing risk, the threat of coercion, and how to stay quiet.
51% attacks and the centralization of mining. What it would actually take to pull one off, and why decentralizing hash rate matters.
Node-level threats, blockchain bloat, and governance capture. Running your own node, the witness-data problem, and how protocol decisions get made.
Political pressure, asset seizure, and mining bans. What state coercion looks like in practice and how Bitcoin survives it.
Grid failures, network outages, and quantum computing. Keeping Bitcoin alive offline, and the long-horizon cryptographic threat.

Author Luke de Wolf is a CISSP- and GICSP-certified industrial cybersecurity professional, producer of the Bitcoin Infinity Show with Knut Svanholm, co-author of Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World, and organizer of the BTCHEL conference in Helsinki. Foreword by Mikko Hyppönen.

If you’re a bitcoiner who wants to think like a defender, or a security-minded reader new to Bitcoin, this book is the bridge. Read it before you need it.