The Importance of Self Sovereignty with Nick Neuman

 
 

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“The very first sentence of the White Paper says that Bitcoin is a peer to peer electronic cash system that can allow people to send payments without going through financial institutions. That’s the first sentence: built around self custody, not around inflation protection, not around digital gold.”
— Nick Neuman

SHOW DESCRIPTION

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.

TIMESTAMPS

00:03:55: Introductions
00:04:49: Analysis of custodied Bitcoin
00:08:18: Systemic risks of third-party custody
00:13:23: Casa's testing and security processes
00:18:40: Regulatory threats to custodied Bitcoin
00:22:57: How custodians protect against government action
00:26:41: Getting started with self-custody and understanding multisig
00:32:01: Further risks of custodial exchanges
00:38:34: Competition amongst custodians and wallets
00:41:32: Institutional custody
00:46:35: Custody security for emerging markets
00:51:59: Planned Lightning integration from Casa
00:55:08: Being CEO of Casa
01:00:52: Casa's future financial services offering
01:03:30: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

Connect with Nick:

Mentioned in the interview:

Other Relevant WBD Podcasts:

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