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
Philadelphia
Joined February 2017
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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.
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.
'a few leaked emails'
tell that to the 12,000 people who had their home addresses, phone, email, name leaked
this is just one example of many
Abandoning self-custody for an ETF or a single custodian is just one exchanging one set of trade offs for another.
Multi-institution custody is elegant because you don't need to be an expert at managing key material and also don't need to rely on a single company. @OnrampBitcoin
digital price tags being rolled out across big box retailers. same time trump says inflation can deal with the debt very rapidly. 🤔
The Last Trade with @profstonge. always good to talk with a fellow Philadelphian.
🔶 retiring to a thai island at 25, then losing it all
🔶 why AI is 1997, not 2000
🔶 data centers polling worse than nukes
🔶 why the jobpocalypse isn't here
🔶 bitcoin as the life raft
what people miss in the AI bubble conversation is that you have to separate openai and anthropic from the technological revolution underneath them.
both can be true. the valuations can blow up in the public markets, and the technology can still be exactly what everyone thinks it is.
with the recent coinbase news, it's worth reminding people that single points of failure are real.
for the longest time the story has been that coinbase customers get their accounts compromised, but the firm and its infrastructure have been impervious since inception. there are now allegations that suggest otherwise.
whatever comes of them, the lesson doesn't depend on the outcome. you don't want your bitcoin sitting in one place. not a single device in your house, and not a single custodian, where one mistake can mean irreversible loss.
news like this is a reminder of why solutions like multi-institution custody need to exist if bitcoin adoption is going to proliferate.
This blew up more than I expected, since I’ve written about this vaguely before.
I can’t share proof yet since multiple legal processes still unfolding and Coinbase already tried to sue me into silence (unsuccessfully, but I need to be smart about how I fight the 800 pound legal bully.)
Every word I’ve written is true, I have no ulterior motive, nor position long nor short Coinbase or related equity. I’m still heavily long crypto, so if anything, I’d be incentivized to help Coinbase cover this up as many industry leading firms have “for the good of the industry”, but I won’t do that. I also think of coinbase as one of the better companies in the industry and have many friends there. No vendetta here. But when the “best” companies in crypto are funneling billions in customer assets to Lazarus group and lying about it to investors, customers, regulators, and the secret service?
Coinbase has represented to investors and customers (including pensions doing official due diligence) that they were never hacked (at least as of 2 years ago, last I checked). Not only is that radically false, coinbase has shockingly extensive internal documentation of them knowingly “misleading” customers and investors about this, deliberately, over time.
I used the word “misleading”, but I’m being…gentle. @grok what is the legal term for a financial company inducing customers and investors to give them capital on the basis of deliberately false material financial representations?
For coinbase’ legal team. I’m not going to dare you to sue me again, but I’ll say this. It would be in the interest of the industry and the world…but not your executives for us to go through discovery and air all this out. I encourage you to assert this as libel so we can go through discovery and see if a single word of my writing is untruthful.
if you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time talking to your droid and on zoom calls
gets tiresome after a while, need some real human interaction
if you're in the philly area, join us for some good conversation and drinks sponsored by @OnrampBitcoin
RSVP below
