Why we are doing this.

This is not a project about cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is only the material we are working with. The project is about a father and his children being able to eat, keep insurance, sleep in a warm place, and have a future that does not depend on anyone else’s mood. Everything that follows in these volumes — the recovery chapters, the ledger pages, the LLC formation briefs, the trust planning — is in service of that one sentence.

Johnathon Drew Bias began experimenting with these networks in their earliest, cheapest days. He helped seed things he did not fully understand at the time. Some of that work was lost; some of it is still out there, scattered across email accounts, exchange databases, and the blockchain itself. The goal of this manual is to find what is real, leave behind what is not, and turn what survives into something useful for a small family in northern Missouri.

The second life.

There were earlier years that were wild and crazy — hard-loving, hard-living, life-of-the-party, no fixed address, the man you would have met then is not the man writing this manual now. People who knew him in those years are still catching up to the person he became while they weren’t looking. That is their work to do, on their timeline. Ours is to keep building, in daylight, the kind of life the second man earned the right to live.

For both children.

There are two children at the center of this work. The younger one, currently being raised at home, who watches their father do paperwork on a Saturday afternoon and learns, without being told, that this is what stability looks like. And the older daughter in Arizona, sixteen, who has had her own road, on her own pace; the door of this manual stays open to her, gently, on the day she chooses it. Both of you are the reason. Both of you are named in the trust to come.

For the chosen family.

Blood is one kind of family. Choice is another, and sometimes stronger. To Brian, to Raymond and to Kevin, to Shelby and her mother, to Maria from Versailles, and to anyone else who showed up across these towns and these years — this manual exists in part because you did. The work is private; the gratitude is not.

We are also doing this because rough beginnings leave gaps in the ordinary places — mailing addresses, recovery questions, paperwork deadlines — and because filling those gaps in the open, slowly, in a calm hand-bound book of one’s own making, is itself a kind of repair.

There is no promise here that we will recover a great fortune. There is only the promise that whatever is actually there will be found, written down honestly, taxed honestly, protected honestly, and used in the service of a family that no longer has to be improvised.

If at any later page the work feels heavy, or the paperwork feels foreign, or the steps feel slow, return to this page first. Read this paragraph. Then go on.