Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower .com,
(From The Sovereign Capitalist Letter #65. I was traveling at the time of the Coinkite vulnerability, surfacing a recurring theme around how to safely balance cold storage and emergency access when on the road).
Just when I thought the sentiment couldn’t get any worse, on July 29-30 reports began to emerge of “certain” Coldcards (which were supposed to be the industry standard of self-custody cold wallets), being drained of their funds.
The reports are true, and this has enormous implications, not just for Coinkite, the Canadian company who manufactures the Coldcard, but for the entire worldview of self-custody and perhaps even for Bitcoin itself.
“Not your keys = not your coins” has been the mantra of Bitcoin since the Genesis Block. Self-custody was The Way. Anything else was for “shitcoiners”, “suitcoiners” and general retards.
It is impossible to overstate how strongly the Bitcoin in-club feels about this. If you don’t self-custody – and until this happened, on a Coldcard by Coinkite – then you were not really a “true” Bitcoiner, you were just LARPing as one. A spectator in the land of the pureblood anarcho-capitalist cyberpunks.
(Admission: my BTC wasn’t on a Coldcard – but I had recently bought new one that I was planning to migrate to after the BIP-110 and eCash forks).
When Utopia arrives… only the self-custody maxis would be admitted – all else would be chattel and serfs under various permutations of slavecoins, CBDCs and (the worst of all) paper Bitcoin.
It all sounds very e
