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
Replies (22)
@Johnny is correct except for the small detail that my script expects you to roll all 24 words and then just changes the last word for you. You can run it on any Linux terminal. Putting Tails OS on any old laptop is a fine option. "AI" could help you get that done every easily.
@johnny did you know "Johnny CAN" was the title of my last essay and I almost changed my name to Johnny on here?
It's called trust-minimized. You trustless doesn't exist once you are talking bits and bytes.
Hello to both of you. I have thoroughly studied the suggested mechanism. I've my CPU/motherboard architecture or RAM allocation). When the bootloader hands over control to the operating system, the system freezes instantly at Booting.... According to AI, this means the Linux kernel cannot map or communicate with the computer's core physical hardware, preventing Tails from loading even a single line of its operating system code.
Concise Technical Diagnosis:
"Root Cause:
The laptop features a modern integrated/dedicated graphics processing unit (GPU) chipset that is completely unsupported by the specific Linux kernel version baked into your current Tails USB build.
Analysis of Attempted Fixes (following your advice
@Johnny):
nomodeset:
Effectively bypassed the proprietary display driver stack and successfully handed over execution from the bootloader. However, the system stalled immediately afterward because it lacked a fallback basic display driver capable of rendering Tails' graphical user interface (GUI) desktop environment.
nomodeset acpi=off:
Successfully disabled Advanced Configuration and Power Interface hardware calls to resolve potential motherboard power-management conflicts. Despite this, the display output remained entirely unmappable by the system's Xorg/Wayland graphical server, resulting in a persistent black screen with a frozen hardware cursor.
Runlevel 3 (Text Mode): Correctly avoided the broken graphical environment entirely and initialized the Linux kernel into an active state. However, interactive text logins (amnesia login) failed because modern versions of Tails strictly disable all interactive TTY virtual consoles by design to enforce system hardening, preventing any command execution without an active GUI session."
Changing the subject for a moment: what’s your take on the BIP-110 conflict—and, more importantly, on what the attempted split and its outcome tell us about Bitcoin’s consensus process?
The network ultimately did not converge around BIP-110, and the minority chain stalled almost immediately. Do you see that as the system working exactly as intended, or as a warning that we may be entering a period where disagreements over Bitcoin’s economic purpose can threaten network coherence?
@Johnny @ZsubmarinerI think this is a dark chapter for Bitcoin, but it is still our best hope and the fight is not over. Bitcoin will either be decentralized and secure peer-to-peer electronic cash or it will be captured as part of fiat and we will have to build something else.
Debían worked. Got the correct seedphrase. Entering the perfect 24-word phrase should now unlock the script's final payload instead of throwing a checksum suggestion. If that is not the case, what do I need to do in order to cross-check Root key and Fingerprint?
Just enter it into your wallet of choice. If, for instance, you are using sparrow on tails, just use that seed, generate a receive address and do a test transaction to send a few sats to it. Confirm that you can recover. All the usual things. Go slow, take care.
So perhaps the deeper question isn't whether Bitcoin can survive disagreement, but whether it can accommodate genuinely different understandings of what the ecosystem is for without those differences becoming grounds for exit?
Less of a 'consensus mechanics' issue and more of an 'ecosystem cohesion' topic.
@KompassFrei leaving for xmr costs more than forking ever did. a fork keeps your coins and your history and you just follow different rules. going to monero means selling first. when someone pays that price it is usually over one concrete thing, and for most of the people i have watched leave it was privacy. i would call that a feature disagreement more than a cohesion problem.
@Johnny @Zsubmariner @Tauri | Bitcoin (XBT)
I have reflected on this whole subject time and time again. When I first shared the post attached below, it found little engagement. I genuinely wonder: was the assumption totally erroneous, or did it hit a raw nerve that the market isn't ready to face?
Money is primarily a medium of exchange, yet we haven't been able to establish widespread adoption around daily, physical peer-to-peer transactions. Instead, we are witnessing massive institutional adoption—which effectively shifts Bitcoin into centralized custody wrappers under the old fiat paradigm.
Seen through the lens of Physics, this fundamentally mutates the network risk. It alters the very nature of the nodes, dampening the organic, scale-free network dynamics driven by sovereign individual users aligning with the protocol's core rules.
The type of adoption absolutely matters. Institutional custody fundamentally changes the structural matrix of the network, replacing a high-entropy, distributed topology with centralized hubs of low entropy. If the price goes up but the underlying architecture flattens into a legacy hub-and-spoke system, have we actually won, or have we allowed the closed thermodynamic properties of the protocol to be stripped away?
Your thoughts on this are warmly appreciated.
View quoted note →
@KompassFrei your assumption is sound, and i'd put the quiet response down to the framing. entropy and topology ask a lot of a reader before the point arrives. i work on merchant acceptance, and daily spending stalls on plain mechanics, paying at a counter is still clumsier than tapping a card.
Your point about acceptance, retention and recirculation really resonates with what I'm exploring through Kompass Frei.
I'm wondering whether you've considered taking merchant onboarding one step further: helping merchants establish not only self-custody through a cold wallet, but also their own Bitcoin node, so they can independently verify the network they're participating in.
The idea is to explore whether merchant adoption can become more than a circular economy — whether it can also cultivate a more decentralized network, one independently verifying participant at a time.
Have you explored anything along those lines?
@KompassFrei i haven't taken merchants that far yet. holding their own keys is already the big ask. would you start them on a plug-in node like Umbrel?
I hadn't come across Umbrel, so thanks for bringing it up.
My thinking comes less from a technical onboarding perspective than from Austrian economics, my work on The Measure of Value, and Santostasi's power-law thesis.
I'm wondering whether the organic growth of Bitcoin depends partly on economic incentives that lead participants to strengthen the network through their own choices, rather than on adoption numbers alone.
Self-custody and independent verification may be two different steps in that process. But I'm equally interested in whether the economic benefits become tangible enough for people to choose both voluntarily.
Perhaps the question isn't how to get every merchant to run a node, but under what conditions doing so becomes a natural extension of participating in a Bitcoin economy.
This is part of a local initiative I'm developing in Colombia within a broader strategic exploration.
The idea is to go beyond merchant acceptance and explore whether financial mentorship, self-custody and independent verification can become mutually reinforcing parts of a Bitcoin economy.
I'm approaching it less as a checklist for adoption than as an experiment in the conditions under which people voluntarily become more independent participants in the network.
Your experience with merchant acceptance would make your perspective particularly valuable. I'd be interested to hear how you see this approach.
I don’t think I’m sophisticated 😬
I'm just constitutionally incapable of not doing way too much 🫣
Custom amnesic OS, physical dice, watch-only and air-gapped setup... all that to protect 40 bucks 😂
But in the end, I gained way more than 50k sats: I earned new knowledge, understanding, and skills 🤓
I think people are capable of it, but many won’t dare to learn or even give it a try.
@KompassFrei i'd bet on the incentive side too. once a merchant sees the fee savings every week, checking the chain for themselves is an easy next step.
Can't audit the firmware - true. But the risks differ: a firmware bug is bounded, per-device, sometimes patchable; a custodian's failure is total, set by someone else, unverifiable ahead. Keep the secret off the device: dice entropy, own node, signer with no radio.
Oh, for Christ’s sake, spare us this UX and inclusivity nonsense, will ya? Bitcoin is for those who can. Open for everyone, but you have to do the work. Proof of work is a UNIVERSAL principle here. I’m sick and tired of these narratives holding the best down just so the worst have convenience. I’m okay with 99% of the world population not using Bitcoin at the base layer level. Expecting any other outcome is delusional.
From what I understand, the network is under heavy constraint due to mining pool centralization. The approach above aims at training and motivating new local users to self-custody, eventually run their own nodes (and/or smartly hash) in order to effectively contribute to the network's growth. (As opposed to growth in value through the increase in price only.)
@Johnny If at all, how do you think this could fit best into a broader, long-term goal as discussed above in the context of BIP-110?
