Can Explain Bitcoin Custody Verbally But Not on Paper

Verbal Understanding That Fails in Written Form

This memo is published by CustodyStress, an independent Bitcoin custody stress test that produces reference documents for individuals, families, and professionals.

What Speech Permits

Ask a holder to describe their bitcoin custody arrangement and they may speak fluidly. They know where things are, roughly how everything works, what happens in various scenarios. But ask them to write it down—to produce documentation someone else could follow—and something changes. Words come harder. Gaps emerge. What felt clear in conversation becomes vague when pen meets paper. The recognition that I can explain bitcoin custody verbally but not on paper reveals a gap between two modes of understanding that matters more than it first appears.

This memo looks at the difference between verbal facility and written precision in custody knowledge. Speaking allows approximation; writing demands exactness. Speaking permits gesture and adaptation to listener feedback; writing must stand alone. The holder who can talk about their setup but cannot document it may possess less understanding than their conversational fluency suggests—or may understand in ways that do not survive translation to the permanent, standalone form that documentation requires.

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What Speech Permits

Verbal explanation benefits from flexibility that writing lacks. A speaker who reaches an unclear point can wave their hand, say "you know what I mean," and move on. Listeners nod; the conversation continues. The speaker need not pin down exact details because shared context fills gaps. A term used loosely in conversation conveys enough to keep the exchange going even if its precise meaning remains unspecified.

Feedback loops in conversation allow real-time correction. A listener's confused expression prompts the speaker to try a different approach. Questions reveal what needs more explanation. Misunderstandings surface and get addressed. This back-and-forth means the speaker never has to achieve perfect clarity on the first attempt—they can iterate toward understanding collaboratively with whoever they are talking to.

Speech also permits comfortable imprecision about sequences and details. "Then you do the thing with the words" gestures toward a process without specifying it exactly. "It's in that folder, the one by the desk" locates something approximately without requiring exact description. These approximations communicate successfully in conversation because the listener can ask follow-up questions or because the speaker would be present to clarify during actual execution. Writing has no such luxury.

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What Writing Demands

Written instructions must succeed without their author present. Someone reading documentation cannot ask for clarification; the document must anticipate their questions and answer them in advance. Every ambiguity that conversation allows becomes a potential failure point in writing. "The folder by the desk" must become a specific location. "The thing with the words" must become an explicit procedure. Approximation gives way to precision or the documentation fails.

Sequence matters in writing in ways it may not in speech. A speaker explaining something verbally can circle back, add forgotten points, and reorder on the fly. Written instructions present their sequence as authoritative—the reader follows step one, then step two, then step three. If the sequence is wrong or incomplete, the reader encounters problems that the writer is not present to solve. Every omitted step, every dependency assumed rather than stated, creates potential confusion.

Writing also demands completeness about prerequisites and context. A verbal explanation can assume shared knowledge: "You know how bitcoin works, so..." Written instructions cannot assume what the reader knows. If the reader lacks background the writer took for granted, the instructions become incomprehensible. Documenting custody for an audience who may be unfamiliar with bitcoin—a spouse, an executor, an heir—requires including context that feels too obvious to mention in conversation.

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Where the Gap Reveals Incomplete Understanding

Attempting to write sometimes reveals that the writer does not actually know what they thought they knew. They sit down to document a process they have performed many times, begin writing, and discover they cannot articulate a specific step. Something they do automatically has never been consciously understood. Muscle memory and intuition guide their actions when they perform the process; those guides do not translate to words on a page.

Verbal descriptions may have concealed this incompleteness from the speaker themselves. They felt confident explaining things because the explanation seemed to work—listeners appeared to understand. But listeners' apparent understanding may have reflected politeness, context-filling, or assumptions rather than actual comprehension of what was said. Writing removes these social smoothing mechanisms, leaving the writer alone with the gaps in their knowledge.

Technical details particularly resist documentation when they were never fully understood. A holder who followed a setup guide without comprehending it can operate their custody arrangement through repetition. Describing it to someone else in conversation, they can approximate and let shared ignorance pass unnoticed. But writing it down exposes that they do not actually know which settings matter, why certain steps are performed in certain orders, or what the various components do. The documentation attempt surfaces understanding that was always shallow.

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The Problem of Implicit Knowledge

Some knowledge exists implicitly—known but not consciously available for articulation. A holder knows that when they restore their wallet, they need to wait for it to sync before checking the balance. They have learned this through experience without ever stating it as a rule. Attempting to document the process, they may omit this implicit step because it does not exist in their explicit understanding. Someone following their documentation would not know to wait and might conclude something is wrong when the balance appears as zero initially.

Implicit knowledge accumulates through repeated interaction with a system. The holder learns dozens of small facts about how their custody arrangement behaves—quirks, sequences, timing—without ever cataloging these facts consciously. Their practical competence exceeds their articulable knowledge. This gap does not matter when they operate the system themselves; it matters enormously when they try to transfer that competence to paper for someone else to use.

The curse of expertise compounds the implicit knowledge problem. Those who know a subject well forget what it was like to not know it. Details that seem too obvious to mention are obvious only to experts. A holder documenting their setup may skip explanations that feel unnecessary to them but would be essential to a reader without their background. They cannot see their own blind spots because those blind spots consist precisely of knowledge so internalized it has become invisible.

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Consequences for Inheritance and Emergencies

Documentation matters most when the holder cannot provide additional explanation. If the holder dies, whatever they wrote stands alone as the guide for others. If they are incapacitated, they cannot answer questions about ambiguous instructions. If they are unavailable during an emergency, helpers must rely on what documentation exists. Each scenario assumes the holder's verbal assistance is impossible, which makes verbal facility irrelevant and written clarity essential.

The gap between verbal and written capability becomes a gap between what the holder can do and what anyone else can do. The holder can access their bitcoin because they can talk themselves through the process internally, filling in gaps from tacit knowledge and correcting errors in real-time. Someone else following written instructions has none of these advantages. They see only what was written, understand only what was explained, and stumble on every omission or ambiguity.

Instructions written for oneself differ from instructions written for others. A holder's personal notes may use abbreviations, references to things they remember but others would not, and compressed sequences that make sense only with insider knowledge. These notes serve as reminders rather than complete guides. Documentation for others must be complete guides, assuming the reader brings nothing but the words on the page. Many holders have written the former when they needed to write the latter.

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What the Gap Suggests About Verbal Explanation

If writing reveals gaps that speaking concealed, the speaking may have been less successful than it seemed. The listener who nodded along may not have understood. The family member who heard the explanation may not have retained actionable knowledge. Conversational success—keeping the exchange flowing without awkward pauses—differs from transfer success—actually moving understanding from one mind to another. Verbal explanation optimizes for the former; the latter may not have occurred.

This calls into question whether verbal explanations to family members actually prepared them for anything. A holder may have explained their custody arrangement multiple times, believing each explanation successful. But if they cannot write down what they said, perhaps they could not say clearly enough to be followed. The explanations may have created impressions of familiarity without creating operational knowledge. Family members know that bitcoin exists and have heard it discussed without actually knowing how to handle it.

Testing whether verbal explanation succeeded would require the listener to demonstrate comprehension—explaining back, walking through the process, answering questions about edge cases. Such testing rarely occurs in informal family conversations. The speaker finishes talking, the listener indicates they followed along, and both parties conclude the communication succeeded. The writing challenge suggests that what succeeded was social exchange rather than knowledge transfer.

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Scenarios of the Verbal-Written Gap

A holder decides to write instructions for their spouse to use if something happens. They sit down with a blank page, confident they can knock this out quickly since they know the process well. An hour later, they have half a page of incomplete notes and a growing realization that they cannot explain clearly what they do intuitively. Details they thought they knew turn out to be vague when they try to pin them down. The instruction project stalls, perhaps indefinitely.

In another scenario, a holder writes documentation that they believe is complete. A technical friend later reads it and points out steps that are missing, terms that are undefined, and sequences that would confuse someone following the instructions literally. The holder protests that they explained it clearly; the friend demonstrates that what feels clear to the writer fails to communicate to a reader without the writer's background knowledge. What was on the page was less than what was in the holder's head.

A third holder avoids writing documentation because previous attempts proved frustrating. They tell themselves that verbal explanation has been sufficient—they have told their family what to do. But if pressed to demonstrate that family members actually understand, they cannot. The verbal explanations created comfort for the holder without creating competence in the listeners. Documentation would reveal this, which is part of why documentation gets avoided: it would expose what speaking has concealed.

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Conclusion

The recognition that one can explain bitcoin custody verbally but not on paper signals a gap between conversational fluency and documented precision. Speaking permits approximation, feedback, and real-time correction; writing demands standalone clarity. What flows smoothly in conversation may stall when confronted with the blank page's demand for complete, accurate, sequential instructions that must succeed without their author present.

This gap often reveals that verbal understanding was less complete than it felt. Implicit knowledge, the curse of expertise, and conversational politeness allow speakers to feel they have communicated successfully when they have only maintained social exchange. Attempting to write exposes these illusions by requiring the holder to articulate what they know without relying on approximation or listener cooperation.

For custody arrangements, the gap matters because documentation must work when verbal explanation is impossible—after death, during incapacity, in emergencies where the holder is unavailable. The holder who cannot document their setup on paper has not prepared others to operate without them, regardless of how many verbal explanations they have provided. What cannot be written may not be understood well enough to be transferred, and what cannot be transferred dies with the holder who alone possessed it.

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