Book Two — Available Now
E V E R Y D Λ Y CRYPTO
An Everyday Guide to Cryptocurrency, managing crypto wealth and protecting yourself and your family.
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Available Now · 28 chapters · No jargon, no hype
The book
Crypto has stopped being exotic.
A quarter of Americans, and one in twelve British adults, now hold some, and most of them bought it on their phone without ever being told how to keep it, who really holds it, or what happens to it when they are gone.
In Everyday Crypto, technologist Wasim Ahmad explains, in plain English, what cryptocurrency is and what it isn’t, how to buy a sensible amount and keep it safe, where the yield on your coins really comes from, what the tax authority needs from you, and how to spot the scams that now run as an industry. Through true stories and real-world cases, the exchange that failed with the customers’ money inside, the hardware wallet whose faulty dice cost its owners their coins five years later, the text message that opens a months-long con, he shows what goes wrong, why, and the calm habits that stop it.
Then it changes register. For the holder of real wealth, and for the wealth managers who have spent years forbidden from touching this asset, it sets out custody that survives an audit, the concentrated position, crypto philanthropy, and the question the whole book walks towards: what happens to it when you are no longer there to hold it.
Five questions run through every chapter: how much, who holds it, in what form, what the tax authority needs, and who inherits it. They are the same questions at fifty dollars a month and at fifty million. Only the zeros change.
You don’t need to become a security expert. But by the time you finish this book, you will know how to protect yourself and your family.
Questions it answers
Every chapter opens with where you are, and closes with what you can do now, the same afternoon.
Inside the book
About the author
Wasim Ahmad has spent decades where this book lives: at the exact point where deep, difficult technology meets everyday people.
It started early. As a schoolboy in Britain in the 1970s, he was among the first children to learn Prolog, the artificial intelligence language. He went on to the University of Sussex to study Mathematical Physics, then switched to Physics and French so he could spend a year in Paris, an early sign of a career that would keep crossing between the technical and the human. After university, he was an astronaut candidate with the Juno Project, but was too young to be allowed into space.
In the 1990s he joined Synon, the British startup whose software-based code generation won the Queen’s Award for Technology, moving with the company to Marin County, California. As a founding member of Voltage Security, a Stanford University spinout, he launched the first commercial email encryption built on Identity-Based Encryption, working alongside some of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, including Stanford’s Dan Boneh. When catastrophic breaches hit the payments industry, he helped launch end-to-end protection for the world’s payment systems using format-preserving encryption.
His crypto journey began with AlphaPoint, working with the founding team that launched some of the world’s first cryptocurrency trading exchanges. He then joined Vault12, the pioneer of crypto inheritance, where the mathematics of Adi Shamir’s Secret Sharing, the scheme at the center of this book’s chapters on backup, the layered setup and inheritance, became a product that lets people pass their digital assets safely to the ones they love.
Most recently, he has been lobbying hard in both the United States and the United Kingdom, engaging with the SEC, the CFTC and the FCA, to evolve the laws and regulations governing crypto, so that everyday people can access these technologies safely and confidently. Everyday Crypto is the second of The Everyday Guides, following Who Holds the Key?
Wasim lives in London and New York.
Also in The Everyday Guides
