The Importance of Self Sovereignty with Nick Neuman - WBD451

Location: New York
Date: Thursday 9th December
Company: Casa
Role: CEO


Not your keys, not your coins.


Despite being a central mantra of Bitcoiners, self-custody is
still an issue for the ecosystem. Whether it be major
institutional investors or new small volume retail buyers, there
are material concerns over the risks and technical skills
required with being responsible for Bitcoin keys.


Whilst delegating custody removes perceived barriers to entry,
they present new risks to individuals and the wider network.
These new risks may be nebulous and abstract to many. But they
are real and significant issues that contravene Satoshi’s central
mission for a decentralized self-sovereign system of peer to peer
cash.


The paradox is that rather than requiring specialist technical
skills, modern hardware wallets are both significantly more user
friendly and intuitive than their recent predecessors. This is
both in terms of the products themselves and the support
infrastructure (i.e. helplines etc.) provided by manufacturers.


Whilst it may be easy to have someone else store your bitcoin, it
is still the case that if you don’t own the keys, you don’t
control the coins. The irony is you may only discover this at the
time you are in most need of your bitcoin.


In this interview, I talk to Nick Neuman, CEO of Casa. We discuss
the scale of third-party custodying of bitcoin, the inherent
risks of delegating bitcoin custody, the security and support
provided to users of hardware wallets, and the latest
innovations.