The painful lesson is that self custody is a tradeoff that doesn't make sense for most people (yet), but the reason why isn't totally obvious.
1. The fiat economy produces what people need, the bitcoin economy does not. We are all dependent on the fiat economy. You need fiat to access the fiat economy. Which means you need offramps or proxy merchants to solve a problem that only exists if you self custody.
2. Understanding entropy is hard. Vast majority of bitcoin influensoors etc don't even understand it.
We have a LOT of work to do if we want a bitcoin standard (which requires self custody). We need to produce goods and services that are in demand and unavailable within the Fiat economy for there to be a reason to even consider it.
We need to figure out self custody primitives that can be learned as easily as using a kitchen knife or driving a car.
Some of the most advanced people in the space can't get self custody 100% perfect (if you were worried about your corn for more than 3 seconds after hearing about cold card then you're not doing it right). That means we have a BIG problem if we expect normal people to self custody.
We also need to stop being priests acting as middle men and create better pathways for ordinary people to have a *direct* relationship with the Protocol and figure things out for themselves, that's the whole reason the whitepaper was published on that particular date.
