Bitcoin has a self-custody problem that nobody wanted to admit.
For years the advice to normal people has basically been:
“Not your keys, not your coins.” “Buy a hardware wallet.” “Self-custody is easy.” “Don’t trust. Verify.”
Except there’s a massive contradiction hiding inside that last sentence.
Most people can’t verify.
They can’t audit firmware. They can’t review source code. They can’t inspect a hardware supply chain. They can’t independently evaluate cryptography. They don’t know whether a vulnerability is sitting undiscovered inside the device protecting their life savings.
So what actually happened?
People replaced trust in a financial institution with trust in hardware manufacturers, developers, maintainers and security researchers — while convincing themselves they had eliminated trust entirely.
That isn’t trustless.
It’s trust you don’t realize you’re placing.
I’ve tried making this point for years because anyone who has worked around software knows there is no such thing as “perfectly secure software.” There are only vulnerabilities we’ve discovered and vulnerabilities we haven’t discovered yet.
That doesn’t mean self-custody is bad.
It means telling every person on Earth to blindly “do self-custody” is bad advice.
For a technically sophisticated person, self-custody can be extraordinary.
For everyone else, multisig, collaborative custody or a competent institutional custodian may actually REDUCE risk.
Bitcoiners hate hearing that because it violates the mythology.
But if mass adoption requires billions of ordinary people to become hardware-security experts just to safely own the asset, we designed the system wrong.
AI went from curiosity to hundreds of millions of users almost overnight because normal people could simply use it.
Bitcoin has had 15+ years.
Maybe instead of blaming everyone for not understanding self-custody, we should finally admit that the UX and security model we handed them was never ready for the mass market.
#Verify #coldcard #btcpayserver #nostr #btc #asknostr #donttrust
