- Hello, and welcome to the Confiscation and Custody panel.
You guys want to take a second, introduce yourselves?
- Oh, okay.
Hello, everyone. I'm John Kerbrad.
I lead the Robinhood Crypto business.
- Jameson Lopp. I'm co-founder and CTO of Casa.
- Joaquin Sasso. I run EMEA and LATAM at BitGo.
- Hello, everyone. I'm Anim in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
I go by the name SeedSigner.
- And I'm David Zell,
the co-founder of the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
So we're talking about confiscation and custody,
but I think a question that we should start with,
just to make sure that everyone is on the same page,
what does it actually mean to "own" Bitcoin?
Like, what does that entail?
- Well, there's legal ownership,
and then there is ownership from the perspective of Bitcoin, the system.
So most of the time, I think, when we talk about owning Bitcoin,
we mean control.
Like, can you tell the system with the correct,
you know, cryptographically signed messages
that you have the ability to control and move your funds as you wish?
But, of course, there's also the legal aspect,
and, you know, when you don't have the physical control,
you may have a level of legal control or, you know, legal proof of ownership
where you should be able to tell third parties to move the funds on your behalf.
- I would throw in as well,
if you own Bitcoin on a platform like Coinbase or another custodial platform,
you have a legal claim to Bitcoin.
Assuming that the organization that you're doing business with
is fully reserved and has access to the Bitcoin.
That's a separate discussion, but...
- Yeah. So when you think of a wallet, you know,
you normally think of something that you, like, put bills or coins or cards in,
but that's a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Bitcoin.
Can you guys explain what a Bitcoin wallet is as well?
- Maybe I can take that one.
I like to explain it literally as a mailbox, right?
In the mailbox, there is an address, which is public.
It's in front of the mailbox.
You give it to, unless you don't want to, you can give it to anyone you want.
There's not huge risk, okay?
There's a measure of risk, but not huge risk.
And anyone can actually deposit in that mailbox if they have that public address.
What you want to keep for yourself is the actual key to open the mailbox
and to basically be able to move whatever is in the mailbox, right?
We can get deeper into how those keys are organized, created, stored, etc.
Different custodial models.
But that would be, in a nutshell, how a wallet would work for Bitcoin.
- Yeah. I mean, I see a wallet as a view of the ledger, as it were.
There are many different components to the software that makes up a wallet.
But every wallet needs to somehow be looking at the blockchain,
have an understanding of which addresses belong to you,
and then whether or not the wallet knows the private keys
and can help you manipulate and control those addresses directly is kind of a separate thing.
But there's UTXO management, fee management, understanding what's happening in the mempool.
It can get very complicated, especially for self-custody wallets.
The thing that the third-party custody wallets have going for them is
they're able to abstract away a lot of that complexity under the hood.
So they can just provide a really slick user interface to you,
so you're just instructing to them to do all of the hard stuff
and they deal with most of the infrastructure.
- I think that's a really natural segue into, I think, the core substance of this panel,
which is there's not just one way to own Bitcoin.
There's lots of ways to custody or entrust the custody of your Bitcoin to someone else.
So maybe you guys could spend a little bit of time talking about the different ways one can own Bitcoin
and their sort of relative trade-offs.
- I think the thing that people sometimes forget about a wallet and Bitcoin is
actually you don't have the Bitcoin physically with you.
What you have is just this address that we discussed about.
And so there are many forms that you can have a wallet.
It could be a piece of paper where you have your key written down.
It could be a sentence from different words.
Or it can be a hardware wallet where it's a physical device.
Or you can trust somebody like Robinhood or Coinbase to store your coins for you.
So there's a lot of different variations of custody.
And I think depending on the type of user you are and how confident you are, you have different options.
- I would structure it at a very, very high level in managed and self-managed custody, right?
Managed custody would be a custody where those private keys, that key to the mailbox,
would be stored and secured by a third party.
Inside that world of third parties, you can have regulated custodians
that are actually scrutinized on how they do it under certain norms,
depending on the country and the jurisdiction, etc., etc.
And there's also a component of that custody model, managed model,
where your broker, the app where you go in, buy and sell, can also be your custodian.
Maybe we can speak a little bit more about that later.
The self-managed world would be a world where with any kind of infrastructure you have,
maybe a special USB like a dresser, etc., etc.,
you actually own and have total control of the private key material that is digital,
but it's of course stored in a device.
So I think that would be a good way of separating the two worlds.
Definitely there are more, let's say, different, you can give different uses,
and there are more features and stuff you can do when you select one or the other,
but I would say that not all of them are prepared and ideal for all kinds of users, right?
And I think that is the differentiation I think we should take into account here.
I think I'd also add it's not necessarily just a dichotomy in that there could be a third party
who custodies your private keys or you could entirely custody your private keys.
Multi-SIG enables some really interesting kind of additional configurations,
which I'm sure Jameson can talk to, where it's what they call collaborative custody,
where a custodian might manage one or a portion of the private keys,
and then the user themselves might manage the remaining private keys.
But I'm happy to let Jameson talk more about that.
Yeah, well, actually, BitGo does as well.
I worked as an engineer at BitGo for three years before pivoting to FoundCasa,
and the multi-SIG distributed key setups were always very interesting to me.
BitGo operates their multi-SIG wallet on an Oracle model
where BitGo is co-signing and applying business logic and other security and validation,
whereas with Casa, we're more focused on individuals and helping individuals
spread a number of different keys on different hardware devices far and wide
in order to give themselves a level of robustness and reliability
and basically allowing for failures to happen and ensuring that a failure won't be catastrophic.
But additionally, Casa also holding one of those keys so that, similar to the BitGo multi-SIG,
we don't have the ability to unilaterally steal your funds.
We don't have the ability to unilaterally freeze your funds.
And you can go even crazier with this.
The ecosystem, I believe, is just starting to scratch the surface of doing even more distributed custody
where you have keys not only shared between two parties, but maybe between three, four, five parties,
maybe even multiple different somewhat trusted institutions.
And I think this is a very interesting way to bridge the gap
between what we have now of full trusted third party and one trusted institution
versus only trusting yourself and having to bear the full responsibility for managing your keys.
Now having some hybrid in between, we're able to spread trust
amongst many different entities and institutions for, hopefully, even more robust security models.
So when someone is thinking about how to custody Bitcoin, they're presented with a suite of options.
They could buy Bitcoin on Robinhood and keep it on their smartphone.
They could keep it on a hot wallet on their phone.
They could explore collaborative custody models.
They could also buy a Trezor or a Ledger wallet.
How do you guys each think about the decision framework that a Bitcoin owner should employ
when deciding what methods or what combination of methods they ought to use to custody their Bitcoin?
How does somebody arrive at, "Well, I'll do partly this, partly that,"
or do you recommend just one form of custody?
I'd like to get into that from each of you.
I'd throw out there, you mentioned the word "arrive," and I would say that the security of your Bitcoin,
the journey is the destination.
So I wouldn't anticipate that any decision that you make to custody your Bitcoin with a service provider
or independently, that may not be the same decision in five years.
A lot of people tend to, as they get more familiar with Bitcoin and more comfortable with the tools,
a lot of people tend to trend more towards a self-sovereign or independent custody the longer that they're Bitcoiners,
but some don't.
But I would just emphasize that it's definitely a journey, and your self-custody plan may change over time,
and that's perfectly fine.
I guess that the actual use case for each one of us changes with that journey, right?
Probably when you start looking into Bitcoin, you only want to be exposed generally to the price.
You're not very technical.
You really don't know or don't want to dig into how to safeguard the private keys,
how to maybe download the Bitcoin code, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's probably when you go to a Robin Hood of the world, which you trust.
Hopefully, you look into what are the custody methods that they use.
Maybe they have their own custody, so your risk is directly with the broker you're using,
or maybe Robin Hood itself or whatever other broker uses a regulated custodian.
By the way, this method would be a method that would have avoided most probably what happened with FTX, right,
because of segregation between custody and trading and fiduciary responsibility of those assets that can't be moved or rehypothecated.
But maybe throughout your lifetime, right, and your use cases may evolve,
you want to start doing other things with Bitcoin, like maybe payments with the Lightning Network, for example,
that's just one of the use cases, and in that case, you need to like enhance the way you interact with that Bitcoin,
the way you safeguard it, where you have it, et cetera, et cetera.
So I would say it really depends on the use case and what do you want to do with it, right?
There's not a perfect answer, I would say.
I mean, I think longevity is one issue to think of as well.
We have to remember this space is incredibly new,
and there are not many companies that have existed in this space for more than five years.
So, you know, I err on the side of paranoia,
but I mean, I think that you should generally assume that companies will blow up or go bankrupt or just go away for any number of reasons.
So Bitco has a pretty good track record compared to a lot of companies in the space.
But compared to a company, if you are holding keys, then what you're really relying upon is the protocol and the network itself.
So, you know, there is no Bitcoin company that has existed longer than Bitcoin the protocol.
I think, you know, Bitcoin itself has the longevity, but even that is, what, 14, 15 years old.
So it's a difficult thing, I think, to weigh long-term aspirations and robustness
versus perhaps more short-term things like trading, doing loans, you know,
more direct financial utilities that are generally going to be offered through trusted third parties.
In some cases, it is possible to do these things directly, but, you know, that aspect of the ecosystem is still being built.
Yeah, I think it will really depend on two things.
One is your level of comfort of using technology, and two is diversification.
I don't think you should be storing all your Bitcoin in one solution.
If you want to go buy a coffee with your crypto, you're not going to go back to your house,
trying to find in your safe your ledger and try to use it, right?
I also don't think, you know, you should put everything on an MPC or a multisig
in case there is an issue with the algorithm, like we still see a problem with MPC to this day.
And at the same time, you should not also fully, completely, like, push everything on a piece of paper
because you don't want to trust anyone, and that piece of paper may disappear.
So I think there is multiple options. That's something at Robinhood we've been focusing on.
So we have our own wallet that you can store on your phone.
You know, the key is yours. Robinhood cannot do anything with it.
And with this wallet, you can do anything.
You can decide, you know, to go on dApps. You can pay with it. You can transfer. This is yours.
And also, if you have a lot of money and you don't necessarily trust yourself to not lose a key
or you are worried about it, you can use Robinhood.
You know, 95% of our crypto is stolen and called.
We don't come and go funds. We don't do anything crazy like we saw with FTX.
And I think it's part of the research for people.
Like, before trusting something like Robinhood or Coinbase, they need to do some due diligence.
The same way that when you go to a bank, you don't just go to a random store at the corner
and you're like, "Hey, how are you, bank?"
So I think, you know, for us, we've been really focusing on giving the choice.
Not every customer will use crypto the same way, and therefore, we need to have multiple solutions for them.
I definitely agree with that.
And I think a lot of people tend to kind of be all eggs in one basket or binary thinkers.
And they don't realize that in the fiat world, you may have a savings account and you have a checking account
and you have a wallet where you carry around a certain amount of currency.
And it's really productive to think about your Bitcoin cold storage use cases as different use cases.
We're here at a conference. We're buying, you know, beers and water.
And a custodial lightning wallet may be a great option for you in terms of convenience.
And if something were to happen with that app or the company that operates it,
you lose, you know, the equivalent of, you know, 50 or 100 euro in fiat.
It may not be the end of the world.
But for the money that you're saving for your later years in life or to hand down to your children,
we're, of course, going to think about that differently.
And there are different tradeoffs with different sorts of Bitcoin storage use cases.
It's just like diversifying your portfolio, literally.
In a way, yeah.
And I think, you know, also something that we forget a lot when the Bitcoin is what happened after.
You know, like some of us are going to die most likely at some point.
And how do you pass this Bitcoin to the next generation, you know?
And so that's at some point you will have to either trust a third party to store your key.
You will have some question on, you know, if you're using something like Robinhood or Coinbase,
can they pass this money to your generation?
So there's a lot of questions that sometimes we forget because we're all excited about the tech.
But, you know, if you're actually putting your saving into it, you need to start thinking about that.
Right. Now, it's sort of an oft-repeated, you know, and sort of axiomatically true thing about Bitcoin
is this phrase, "Not your keys, not your coins."
That's something that, you know, you see from a lot of thought leaders in the Bitcoin space
who really encourage people to take custody of their own Bitcoin.
But if we look sort of honestly at the global landscape of Bitcoin usage,
I think it's pretty clear that most people are not using the network in that way.
They are sort of taking legal claims to Bitcoin and letting the Robinhoods of the world custody their Bitcoin for them.
So my next question is this.
What do you guys think about the sort of trajectory of custody solutions?
What does the future of Bitcoin custody look like?
And when we think about how the next million or the next billion users may custody Bitcoin,
does that trend concern you at all?
Yes. I mean, this is what I've been doing for nine years, focusing on self-custody wallet software,
because I think it's obvious that the convenience that custodians can provide is a major market advantage.
Human nature is that we tend to choose the most convenient option pretty much regardless of everything else.
So my goal is to continue trying to make self-custody as convenient as possible,
because it's the only way to stem the tide of ending up with the overwhelming majority of people trusting a handful of third parties.
And it's hard to say whether or not we're winning. It doesn't feel like we're winning.
But then as long as the option is there, I think that we at least are giving people the ability to opt out if they put in the time.
But this is the tricky part, is you have to take a lot of responsibility,
and that's another thing that's kind of against human nature and really the arc of civilization.
We're able to continue advancing civilization through outsourcing various aspects of our lives to trusted third parties.
So it's a really weird thing to be working in the self-custody space,
because it feels like you're actually fighting against human nature.
I think that's the key, right?
If we want to be realistic, in my opinion, right now with the technology we have right now, and of course this will evolve,
if we think about 1 billion, 2 billion users real adoption,
if we think about our grandparents interacting with Bitcoin or our parents even,
I think it's not realistic right now with the technology we have
that too many people are going to go for the self-managed way, right?
So I think that's a little bit the balance and the reality we have to see.
If we really want quick adoption, there is not many chances that in the next 5 to 10 years self-manage is going to be the key.
Actually, it's going to be, in our opinion, the opposite, right?
That's why BitGo, for example, sets up regulated fiduciary custodians,
just in the same way there are custodians in the traditional financial world.
It gives protection to the client, it's very, very seamless to use and to interact, etc., etc.
You just get all the nuances and the complications of storing the private keys.
It is true that you give up a little bit of the decentralization of the chain, etc., etc.
There are disadvantages, of course, you have to give up something.
The question is, are those 1 billion, 2 billion people,
will those people agree to say no to those advantages of the chain
in order to have a seamless interaction with Bitcoin?
And are they comfortable with having this third-party custodian or not?
We think that the real adoption is through the custodianship way, right?
I'm assuming you disagree.
I wouldn't say disagree, but I think we're also kind of speaking abstractly
as though there's one unified Bitcoin user that lives in a unified political environment
where all the variables are the same.
And the truth is, there are very different people in different political environments around the world
that have very different interests in Bitcoin,
whether it's number go up, trying to escape inflation,
or if it's that they live in some sort of oppressive political regime
and Bitcoin is a lifeline for them to be able to organize or oppose a government.
So it's definitely important that we have all of these different tools out there based on people's needs.
But I think over time, the tools are going to improve,
and I think the reason to self-custody Bitcoin is also going to increase over time.
I think a lot of us in this room have a sense that governments are becoming more invasive
into different parts of our lives, and technology at large, unfortunately,
is a force that they can leverage to gain more control over our lives, especially financially.
That's a caveat to what happened with the Canadian truckers in Canada,
where you wouldn't expect those kind of behaviors from a government in an evolved first world country.
But I would just add that the tools are getting there, but it takes time.
As Jameson noted, Bitcoin itself is 14, 15 years old.
There have only been tools in the space that are being honed for a few years.
So the tools are getting better, and I think over time the "why" is going to become strong enough
that the "how" becomes easier for people.
If I may offer an optimistic perspective,
I believe that one of the primary reasons that we see so many people coming into Bitcoin
with third-party custodians is quite simple.
They are the on-ramps.
The reason that a lot of people are coming into Bitcoin is from the financial investment perspective.
And in order to do that, you have to have something straddling the traditional financial system
with the new financial system.
And these are the exchanges.
These are the brokerages, the places where most people actually acquire their coins.
What am I getting at?
I think the solution to that is something that a lot of people are striving for,
which is this "circular" Bitcoin economy.
So I think that the way that you start to push away from that major centralizing force
is you stop telling people to buy Bitcoin.
You tell people to earn Bitcoin.
When you're earning Bitcoin, I think it's much more likely that people will be receiving it to a self-custody wallet.
Cool.
Well, we want to talk about confiscation as well.
So I'm going to ask one more question kind of about self-custody
that I think will be a natural segue into a conversation about confiscation risk.
So we've talked about the sort of benefits of using a third-party custodian,
whether that's sort of ease of access, makes it easier for my parents to buy Bitcoin and manage it.
We've also talked about some of the sharp downsides of those solutions as well.
So I'd be remiss not to ask, what are the sort of core advantages of self-custodying Bitcoin?
Like if someone came up to you on the street and said, "I just bought my first Bitcoin.
Should I keep it with a custodian or should I buy a Trezor or do whatever?"
Pitch me in 60 seconds on the value of self-custody.
I think the real innovations of Bitcoin answer that question.
We have electronic dollars and euros that we can send around the world,
but the innovation of Bitcoin that I am most focused on is the censorship resistance of Bitcoin,
the dilution resistance of Bitcoin, the seizure resistance of Bitcoin.
And all of those use cases typically involve self-custody,
because if you are not holding the private keys yourself, you're asking permission from someone else.
So if you should run afoul of, you know, be outside of the Overton window trying to exercise your financial power,
you could be restricted from doing that.
So self-custody, in my opinion, is what enables all of these truly transformative use cases that Bitcoin embodies.
I think I agree with that, but I think it will depend on who that person is.
And I think my first question to them will be like, "Where are you from? Do you know crypto? Do you know technology?"
At the end of the day, I'm pretty sure that if I ask the audience,
there are more people that lost crypto from a self-custody wallet than from a Coinbase or from a Robinhood.
And the reason for that is because it's very complicated.
And we have to be honest, as technologists, this technology has been built by engineer for engineer for a very long time.
If you think about it, when someone wants to use an iPhone or when someone wants to send a text or something,
they don't want to know how is the thing working behind.
They don't want to know the code. They don't care about any of that.
They just want the text to be sent and be received as fast as possible.
And for a lot of people, that's what they want with the money, right?
We are lucky in the EU or in the US to have grown in a world where banks exist and everything.
But in some countries, they skipped that part.
They didn't have the banking system from the '80s being developed.
So for them, having a self-custody option is their only way to have a bank, actually, and to have a real savings system.
So depending on where they are from, I think the answer will change a lot.
All right. Any other thoughts before we move on?
Unfortunately, this, once again, is kind of the convenience versus the more theoretical paranoid aspect.
I think we all know why you would want self-custody and not have to ask permission.
The big trade-off and the thing that I think most people balk at is the level of responsibility that comes with taking on,
holding your own keys, and talking directly to the Bitcoin network rather than to a third party who is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Right. Well, let's move into the confiscation part of this discussion.
It's often repeated in Bitcoin circles that the asset is "unconfiscatable."
So that's my question. Is Bitcoin confiscatable?
Yes.
Wait, but Jameson, I thought Bitcoin was unconfiscatable.
There's a confiscation.
Have I been lied to? What's happening?
Bitcoin has always offered the promise of being your own bank.
And in fact, I argue that it is possible to create security architectures that are far exceeding any security that the greatest bank vault in the world,
even Fort Knox, could offer to you if you wanted to secure an asset like gold or physical cash.
However, an exceedingly small portion of Bitcoin users have put themselves into a security architecture that is anywhere near that robust.
The vast majority of Bitcoin holders don't even hold their own keys.
Those that do, probably, definitely the vast majority of them have single points of failure in their architecture.
Most of them, if they have graduated to using a hardware device, they still probably have a single signature wallet with a single key backup somewhere.
And these are single points of failure that can be confiscated by authorities if they can be found.
So my point, and kind of shilling my own company, like unless you're using multisig, unless you're distributing keys in multiple places to eliminate those single points of failure,
most likely there is confiscation risk.
It just becomes a question of how difficult is it to find those keys.
Yeah, this is part of my background, a little bit of my back story.
I was a police officer for 15 years in the United States and worked in a digital forensic lab,
assisted with writing legal process and search warrants and actually executing search warrants.
I don't say that to make myself the most popular person here, but I have a unique perspective on the seizure of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is absolutely a seizable asset.
And something like a Trezor Ledger commercially available hardware wallet is immediately recognizable as some sort of private key storage device.
Now, whether it's involved in a multisig quorum, that's another issue.
But what has impressed me over time about Bitcoin that Jacobson alludes to is the multisig use of Bitcoin,
because that is a nightmare for any sort of government or even just private adversary, a thief trying to steal your funds.
The ability to spread the ownership of the private keys out over a geographic area is just something that most traditional law enforcement entities will struggle to deal with.
Because, part being, they just don't know where the keys may be.
They may be in another legal jurisdiction.
Only the person who is custody of the funds may know where the keys are or how many keys there are.
Bitcoin is definitely seizable, but if you're willing to put in the work and you're careful,
it can be custody in ways that are what I would call very seizure resistant.
Now, the flip side of all of this is, even if you have the perfectly distributed key set,
where perhaps your keys are in multiple countries that are not friendly with each other on a legal perspective
and would not send authorities over to each other to extradite the key material,
you yourself are always a single point of failure.
There is no way to decentralize the custody of my own body.
Therefore, your government, of course, can always put you in a small box and just sit on you until you decide to cooperate or not.
Fair point.
I think it ends up really being, the question is, can law enforcement authorities put together enough private key material to open your mailbox, right?
It really ends up being that.
It doesn't matter how many shards you have, how many pieces of the keys you have, or what technology you use.
It really ends up being that.
And as you say, your body can't be decentralized.
I want to bring in the audience quickly for a little participation.
We're all friends here, so it's okay.
Go ahead and raise your hand if you're a criminal.
Okay, so Jameson is a criminal, you over there are a criminal,
but it looks like the overwhelming majority of you do not self-identify as one who commits crimes.
Shocking.
My question is, why should all of these non-criminals worry about confiscation risk?
You know, if you're not doing anything wrong, why worry about your Bitcoin being seized?
Well, I'm sorry, but the audience is ignorant.
I mean, we are all criminals, you may just not realize it.
Well, I think also the audience, you know, we are all in Europe here,
and we remember what happened in 2008, 2009, when Greece's central bank decided to freeze some accounts.
And I think that's a real problem that can happen when something is centralized.
But I think to our point earlier, I think it's the question of diversity.
You cannot put all your coins in a wallet where you have to call 20 people to agree on unlocking these coins
before you want to buy your coffee.
And at the same time, you should not put all your savings in a place that can be confiscated.
So I think we also need to remember Bitcoin is public.
You can see all the funds moving in and out.
And so that's a big risk, where you're giving a lot of information every time you're transacting.
I think financial and political instability is one of the main reasons.
You don't have to be a criminal to want to be safe from all those things.
As you said, recently in the last 15, 20 years, we've seen crisis after crisis.
I think I lived more years in crisis than in a good economic environment.
So I guess especially, as you were saying earlier, depending on where you are, where you've been born,
you might be more concerned about that than many people who are sitting here right now.
I'd like to circle back to that concept of criminality.
And it makes me think of a quote by Ayn Rand in that honest men cannot necessarily --
governments are not designed to rule honest men.
So the government, over time, will create so many rules such that there are no honest men.
And governments are much more effective at ruling over criminals.
So we, again, allude back to the Canadian trucker situation because it was so informative for us as Bitcoiners.
A lot of people who were sending small donations to the truckers,
who they themselves may not have been involved in the protests or in any of the activity that was going on,
just sending a few Canadian dollars to help support and buy fuel for the truckers,
they probably did not consider themselves criminal or did not consider that to be an illegal act.
But the Canadian government responded very quickly and started freezing people's funds who had donated to the truckers.
So I just throw that out there as some perspective.
Maybe we're all a little bit more criminal, or we could be, than we think.
Therein lies the problem.
I mean, the criminal codes of any developed country are so complex, even lawyers don't know them all.
Even lawyers only specialize in small portions of criminal code.
I don't think anyone can honestly state that they have not committed any infractions against the criminal codes of their country.
Very true.
So it sounds like even if you're not a self-identified criminal, you should probably care about confiscation risk.
So good to know.
Thanks, everyone.
Even without just confiscation, like we've seen in recent examples of banks, for example,
preventing you to use your debit card or credit card the way you want.
So, for example, Chase has been preventing people to load their Coinbase account, I believe.
And, you know, that's just something that, you know, it's not you actually being a criminal because you just want to be exposed to crypto.
But because this entity decided that this was a risk for them, they actually blocked you.
And I think that's a big problem.
Yeah.
So as we're wrapping up here, I don't know if we have time for another question,
but I think we do have time for each of you to give some closing thoughts about what we've discussed today.
So maybe we start with you, Seedsigner, and work our way down.
Sure.
I probably represent the mountain man self-custody philosophy on the stage here.
A tiny bit more about what I do.
I lead an open source software project that allows people to build themselves a Bitcoin cold storage device from off-the-shelf parts.
You can do it privately without even purchasing something that would knowingly associate you as someone who's saving Bitcoin or as a Bitcoiner.
It's geared for multi-sig first, and it can put some very powerful tools with what I like to think is an intuitive UI in front of people,
so that when people are ready to take that step into self-custody, especially multi-sig self-custody,
when I hear people say that self-custody and multi-sig are too complicated, my response is then we're not doing it right yet.
So the tools are getting better, and for people who want to get there, the resources are out there.
So dig in, and I think it's not as easy as you might think.
But that's my spiel.
I would say, and this is a good segue, until that technology is not super easy to use by absolutely everyone,
the good news is that there's still other ways of customing your assets, interacting with them in a secure way,
without having to be exposed to things like FTX and this type of scandals.
There are regulations already in place in different jurisdictions in the world that really protect the users and the people who use these custodians from bankruptcies,
and they have all the checks and balances that you need to have to protect the customer as much as possible.
Of course, it doesn't have to be binary.
There are grey areas. You can use a hybrid model or just use one and then change to the other one to the self-managed whenever you feel comfortable,
and there's real easiness of use.
In our case, BitGo is one of the largest regulated custodians in the world.
We also have a very, very big self-managed wallet infrastructure that around 30% of the exchanges out there use.
We pioneered Multisig for Bitcoin wallets a time ago.
Jameson knows more about that than me.
I think technology will have to continue developing until it really covers all the use cases
and we can really give an absolute hybrid number of options to users that want to hold Bitcoin and interact with it.
Well, listen, it's actually very easy to take custody of your Bitcoin.
There's a hundred different apps that you could download, set up in less than five minutes, generate some keys and withdraw funds to.
However, the difficulty is in setting up self-custody in such a way that you avoid the million different foot guns
and ways that you can really screw yourself and lose access to your money.
It's all of these adversarial edge cases that people tend not to think about that end up coming and biting them
over the long term of self-customing for many years.
And so the short version of what Kasa does is we have a distributed multisignature self-custody set up,
several different architectures that we offer to people.
And what we really add as value is, think of us as a consulting service.
We help people navigate all of the decision making that is required when you're trying to figure out,
how do I want to distribute my keys?
How do I need to figure out how to be able to handle inheritance or certain types of loss situations?
And how do I do it in such a way that I don't have to trust any single third party,
even Kasa, even any of the hardware manufacturers, so on and so forth.
Yeah, and I think for us at Robinhood, we've been really focusing on giving the choice to the customer.
We have a lot of assets under custody, and we don't make a single cent.
We don't leverage against it.
We don't lend.
So for us, we actually don't really have an opinion.
If you don't feel like you're ready to self-custody, you can leave it on Robinhood.
We store all our assets on cold storage up to 95% plus, and the rest is just here to support operation and transfer.
And if you don't want to do that and you want to have your self-custody option, we give you a wallet,
or we allow you to transfer if you're eligible to any other wallet.
I think for us, the main focus has been to remove the barrier to entry to crypto.
I still think it's too complicated.
I think we still have a lot more work to do.
And for us, we've been focusing on giving the best price if you want to purchase crypto
and let you transfer if you want to.
Awesome.
Well, we've heard some diverse perspectives on Bitcoin and custody, so thanks to all of you.
My thoughts as the moderator, don't trust people, third parties, with more Bitcoin than you can afford to lose.
But just my two cents.
I appreciated all of the diverse opinions.
Thank you guys so much.