1. What this page is

Hodler's Handbook is a long-form content site about crypto custody, exchange risk, wallet recovery, and security practice, independently operated by me (writing under the pen name Frost Kim). What you read here is an "experience log" — not a financial service, not investment advisory, not legal opinion. This page makes the boundary of "what I can vouch for" explicit.

For the commercial relationship between me and partners like Binance, see the Disclosure page for full transparency; for how this site handles reader data, cookies, and Google Analytics, see the Privacy Policy.

2. Not investment, financial, legal, or tax advice

Every article, FAQ entry, glossary term, case study, and tool on this site is educational and experience-based. Any phrasing such as "I recommend wallet X", "I personally use exchange X", "BIP-39 works like this", "this backup setup has held up for three years" is a record of my own use, not investment advice, financial planning advice, legal advice, or tax advice for you.

How crypto assets are handled under law varies wildly by jurisdiction. Your location, your tax residency, the size of your holdings, your family situation — all of these affect what is "right" for you. This site has no knowledge of your specific situation and cannot judge it on your behalf.

If you are about to make a decision involving meaningful sums, tax reporting, estate planning, or cross-border transfers, consult a licensed financial advisor, tax advisor, or attorney.

3. The real risks of crypto assets

I'm putting this section near the top because it matters more than any tutorial:

  • Price risk. Crypto asset prices are volatile; single-day moves of ±30% have occurred repeatedly throughout history. Long-term holding does not eliminate the psychological stress of short-term swings or the risk of forced liquidation.
  • Compliance and regulatory risk. Local policy can change without notice, restricting trading, holding, transfer, or withdrawal. This site does not predict regulatory direction.
  • Exchange risk. Even centralized exchanges that publish reserves and run insurance funds can still be hacked, run aground on internal fraud, fail operationally, suffer liquidity crunches, or get frozen by regulators. Mt.Gox, QuadrigaCX, Celsius, FTX are not ancient legends.
  • Wallet and private key risk. A seed phrase lost, phished, stolen by malware, or extracted under physical coercion cannot be "recovered through customer support". Once on-chain assets are moved, in the vast majority of cases they cannot be retrieved.
  • Smart contract risk. DeFi protocols can go to zero through code bugs, oracle failures, cross-chain bridge exploits, or stablecoin depegs. Even multi-audited protocols carry no guarantee of safety.
  • Approval risk. Once an on-chain signature (approve / permit / setApprovalForAll) lands in a malicious contract, the assets in your wallet can be drained in bulk. The tools on this site cannot revoke those approvals for you.
  • Personal safety risk. Once the size of your holdings becomes visible, it can invite SIM Swap attacks, in-person robbery, or coercion of family members. This category has nothing to do with technology — it's about operational habits and information isolation.

Nothing on this site eliminates these risks, and nothing guarantees any investment outcome. Understand the risks thoroughly before deciding whether to participate.

4. Who I am not affiliated with

Hodler's Handbook is not the official site of any cryptocurrency exchange, wallet project, foundation, or regulator. No ownership, employment, holding, or agency relationship exists between this site and:

  • Any exchange mentioned in articles, including but not limited to Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate.io, KuCoin, HTX.
  • Any wallet project mentioned in articles, including but not limited to Ledger, Trezor, Coldcard, Keystone, OneKey, MetaMask, Rabby, Trust Wallet.
  • Any failed project mentioned in articles, including but not limited to Mt.Gox, QuadrigaCX, Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, 3AC, FTX, Terraform Labs.
  • Any regulator, court, or government body mentioned in articles.

The only commercial relationship between this site and any entity above is as an independent partner in the Binance Affiliate referral program (code BN16188). The full disclosure for that relationship lives on the Disclosure page.

5. Third-party links and third-party content

Articles on this site include links to third-party websites (such as github.com/bitcoin/bips, eips.ethereum.org, ic3.gov, dfs.ny.gov, coinkite.com, ledger.com, trezor.io, revoke.cash, etherscan.io). These links exist to make sources verifiable; they are not an endorsement of those sites' content, privacy practices, security, or availability.

Statistics, news events, court rulings, and regulatory documents cited in articles carry source attributions where possible. If you spot a citation error, send it through the Corrections page and the fix will be logged publicly.

6. Content copyright and reuse

Copyright in all original articles, glossary entries, case studies, and tools on this site belongs to this site, and they may not be used commercially without permission. Personal, non-commercial citation and reposting is permitted, provided the source and original link are attributed. Not permitted:

  • Using site content to train models that are then offered as commercial services (outside the standard robots.txt rules).
  • Editing or rewriting site content and publishing it as your own.
  • Removing the byline, source link, or citation markers from reposts.
  • Inserting commercial promotion that conflicts with this site's positioning (such as referrals to other exchanges or investment products) into reposts.

The fonts used on this site (Crimson Pro, Caveat, JetBrains Mono) come from Google Fonts under their respective public licenses. OG images and article art are custom or used with permission.

7. The limits of the tools

This site offers two simple tools: a seed phrase format checker and a risk exposure calculator. Understand what they can and cannot do:

  • The seed phrase checker only checks format. It tells you "whether the word count is right and the words look like BIP-39", but it cannot tell you "whether this is a real seed phrase that recovers a wallet". Do not paste a live, in-use seed phrase into any online device. For full checksum verification, use the offline HTML version of iancoleman/bip39.
  • The risk exposure calculator only flags concentration. Based on the positions and amounts you enter, it produces a rough "concentration score". That score does not constitute asset allocation advice and is no substitute for your own assessment of risk appetite, jurisdiction, and income stability.

Both tools run entirely in your browser. They do not save, do not upload, and do not log. Closing the page destroys the in-memory data.

8. Governing law and disputes

This site is operated on the public internet for a global readership. Disputes about copyright, trademarks, or with readers are, in principle, governed by the law of where the site is operated from (the People's Republic of China). The site does not guarantee compliance boundaries across all jurisdictions.

If you believe content on this site infringes your rights (copyright, privacy, trademark, etc.), contact the email below and the matter will be reviewed and addressed within a reasonable time.

9. Contact

Corrections, citation issues, copyright matters: use the Corrections page or email corrections@wechibi.com.

Compliance, privacy, data requests: email privacy@wechibi.com (the full mechanism lives in the Privacy Policy).

Security reports: see /.well-known/security.txt.