Building on the frontier of money, health, and work | Macro MAHA AI Bitcoin | Writing weekly https://xitter.cf/t.co/Q96teArHb7 | @onrampbitcoin | Last Trade Pod
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Joined February 2017
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if you're all in on Bitcoin, you're seeing the major disruption in the workforce due to AI, but you're staying the course, building a sound life on sound money
then id love to have you join me here!
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this letter makes a strong case for multi-institution custody.
i agree: giving your keys to a single custodian doesn’t make the risk go away. it moves it somewhere you can’t see or control.
but the alternative proposed here, spreading keys across geographic locations and supply chains, isn’t practical for most people. life is busy. between a family and a full-time job, most people don’t have the time to maintain that setup with the opsec it requires, running key checks across multiple locations for years on end. most don’t want to do it to begin with.
and there’s a tension in it. the more widely you spread your keys, the harder it gets for your family to recover them if something happens to you.
multi-institution custody gives you a setup that tolerates failure, without the burden. @OnrampBitcoin, @BitGo, and @Coincoverglobal each secure a key offline, never on a consumer device, in a 2-of-3 multisig. no one of them can lose, move, or use your bitcoin, and nothing moves without your permission.
it’s the third way, pioneered by @OnrampBitcoin.
Jackson retweeted
Modern finance runs on the assumption that someone steps in when things blow up. Bitcoin has no bailouts.
This week on The Last Trade...
⚡️ JPM puts bitcoin FIRST
⚡️ The IMF on financial repression
⚡️ $3.1T in off-balance-sheet AI debt
⚡️ Trump Accounts, SpaceX, & UBI
. @McDonalds really capitalizing on the K shaped economy
most of the industry thinks multi-institution custody is a niche product. what i see every day is the opposite.
most of the people i talk to have done all sorts of self custody. single sig. multi sig. collaborative custody.
and they’re still choosing multi-institution custody.
It's amazing to me that politicians essentially have infinite ammo for finger pointing on inflation
what if it was just as simple as governments printing money?
Jackson retweeted
Preach. The gold-vault comparison is spot on, and multisig is what makes Bitcoin different. Onramp's multi-institution model is a solid answer for people who want security without managing keys themselves 💯
Jackson retweeted
SELF-CUSTODY HAS TAKEN A MAJOR BLOW, BUT THERE IS A WAY FORWARD
@macrojack21 warns that the recent hardware wallet security failures have pointed out serious weaknesses in Bitcoin self-custody.
But @MTanguma argues that if self-custody ceases to be viable, Bitcoin itself will fail.
The biggest lesson from these attacks is that Bitcoiners can no longer afford to have a single point of failure when securing their wealth.
we’ve been talking about this for a while at @OnrampBitcoin
goldsmiths, and then vaults, were critical to gold spreading as a monetary asset, for exactly these reasons.
being your own bank is a sexy idea, and people like to fantasize about it. they tend to forget that people rob banks, and that it takes real responsibility and time, not just from you but from your family.
the difference between bitcoin and gold is multisig. gold required you to trust the vault. bitcoin doesn’t have to.
multi-institution custody bridges that gap. no seed phrases or signing devices to manage, and no blind trust in a single institution that could be compromised and cause permanent loss.
it's kinda ironic how this whole ledger debacle is teaching people why banks were invented in the first place
being personally responsible for securing all your savings is actually really annoying and takes so much work, everyone is out to get you and mistakes are easy to make
I remember in 2017 first getting into crypto we did these newbie thought experiments like "is everyone in the future really going to bank from these usb sticks?!"
looks like we got our answer
it also reminds me of one of @hosseeb's contrarian takes years ago where he said "decentralization sucks" and it being a means to an end, not something you want just for the sake of having it - a spectrum where you sacrifice efficiency and convenience to gain censorship resistance and trust minimization, but the key is finding the proper tradeoff for whatever you are trying to build
similarly self-custody sucks, you are basically gaining independence at the cost of personal security and even people who have been doing everything right are dropping like flies (hardware exploits, randomizer bugs, wrench attacks, hacks, etc)
don't make your life depend on it I guess
Jackson retweeted
Bitcoin’s assumed path to mass adoption was to teach self-sovereignty one person at a time until it reached seven billion people.
After Coldcard and Ledger, @alexstanczyk doesn’t think that’s the path anymore.
His read on where custody goes from here: trusting a single intermediary, whether that’s one hardware wallet maker or one custodian, stops making sense.
Holding a meaningful allocation on a single device puts a heavy burden on one person, and the industry’s answer of "just do multisig" only adds complexity.
So he sees two paths for anyone who wants to own real bitcoin directly. Multi-vendor multisig for the people willing to learn it, and Multi-Institution Custody for everyone else.
MIC didn’t click for him at first. Now:
"After all these things have happened, it looks like you guys [Onramp] were way ahead of the curve. You were ahead of the entire industry."
Appreciate it, Alex 🤝
the same way people wish they’d been earlier to bitcoin will be true with AI.
being early to bitcoin meant buying at a fraction of today’s price.
being early to AI means building skills that make you more valuable, whether you’re starting a business or competing for highly lucrative roles
the people integrating it into their work now are going to be vastly ahead of those who aren’t
Jackson retweeted
🔴 LIVE AT 3PM ET: LEDGER UNBOXING & DISASSEMBLY
Could your Ledger hardware wallet contain a hidden spy device?
@MTanguma and @macrojack21 join us LIVE as we unbox and disassemble a Ledger Nano X purchased in the United States, looking for signs of malicious hardware implants.
Join us to see what we find!
🤖 Made with AI
"do you trust yourself or do you trust someone else?"
that's been the choice in bitcoin for over a decade. fully trust yourself to manage your wealth, or fully trust a single institution.
but now it's a false binary. you can distribute the trust. that's multi-institution custody.
no seed phrases or devices to manage, inheritance handled, but not reliant a single institution.
three institutions protect your bitcoin (2 of 3 multisig), and none of them can move it or lose it.
we pioneered it at @OnrampBitcoin.
Self custody has always been hard.
Only the maximally paranoid survive.
Recently with the Coldcard RNG exploit, Trezor e-mail leaks, and the supply chain attacks with Ledger, it's become even more apparent how hard long term self custody is for the average HODLer.
This means buying direct, using multisig, using your own entropy, etc.
It all comes down this: Do you trust yourself or do you trust someone else? If you don't fully grok the responsibility, then it actually might be more prudent to use custodial solutions.
Or holding some % of coins with trusted custodial solutions (ex: Kraken/Coinbase) and a majority in self custody.