In practice, the most common failures happen during recovery and continuity events.
Let me show you what professional custody audits actually reveal.
The fundamental problem: Most custody implementations optimize for the wrong threat model. They're designed to resist external attackers—hackers, thieves, physical compromise. But they're not designed to survive the far more common scenarios: device failure, memory decay, unavailable signers, unclear roles, or legal friction.
Think about your own setup for a moment. Really think about it.
If you died tomorrow, could your spouse actually recover your Bitcoin? Not "do they know it exists"—could they execute the technical procedures required to access it? Have you tested this with them, step by step, while you're present to verify it works?
If your primary hardware wallet failed right now, how long would it take you to restore access using your backup procedures? Do you remember the exact steps? Are your backup materials still readable? Do you know where everything is located?
If you needed to relocate internationally with 48 hours notice, would your custody architecture survive the geographic disruption? Or are your keys and backups concentrated in ways that assume residential stability?
If your most technical co-signer became unavailable—moved away, had a falling out, died—does your system still function? Or did you create a dependency on that specific person's availability and expertise?
Most holders can't answer these questions with certainty. And that uncertainty is the vulnerability.
This is what keeps me up at night about custody education: We teach people to implement security systems, but we don't teach them to maintain custody infrastructure. We optimize for attack resistance, but we ignore operational resilience.
The result? Holders with "secure" setups that are functionally insecure because they can't be recovered under real-world stress conditions.
Consider the typical failure cascade:
First, something changes in your life—you relocate, your capital scales significantly, a family situation shifts, your health declines. Your custody architecture, designed for previous conditions, no longer matches your current threat model. But nothing seems broken, so you don't notice.
Second, time passes. Your familiarity with recovery procedures fades. Your co-signers become less available or less technically capable. Your backup materials degrade physically. Your devices age and firmware versions drift. Each month, your operational readiness decreases slightly.
Third, a stress event occurs—you need to move funds urgently, a device fails, you become incapacitated, you die. This is when your custody architecture needs to perform flawlessly. Instead, you discover all the accumulated weaknesses simultaneously.
The setup that looked secure during normal operation fails catastrophically under the exact conditions where it needed to be strongest.
This isn't a technical problem. This is an operational preparedness problem disguised as a technical problem.
Most custody frameworks are designed by people who understand cryptography but not human behavior under stress. They assume rational actors with perfect memory, stable life circumstances, and infinite availability. They don't account for the messy reality of how custody actually operates over years and decades.
The uncomfortable truth: A system that cannot be recovered is functionally insecure, regardless of how well it resists attack.
Your multisig configuration might be mathematically sound. Your key distribution might prevent single points of cryptographic failure. Your backup procedures might follow best practices. But if your spouse can't execute recovery when you're gone, if your co-signers aren't actually available when needed, if your documentation has become outdated or compromised—your custody architecture has failed its primary function.
Security isn't just about preventing unauthorized access. Security is about ensuring authorized access under the full range of conditions where access becomes necessary.
And that requires a fundamentally different approach to custody design—one that treats Bitcoin security as permanent wealth infrastructure requiring professional architecture, ongoing maintenance, and periodic stress-testing.
Not because you're not smart enough to figure it out yourself. But because the pattern recognition required to identify your specific failure modes comes from seeing hundreds of implementations fail under real-world conditions—and you only get one chance to get yours right.