The All-Important Journey To Self-Custody Bitcoin

This is an opinion editorial by Mark Maraia, an entrepreneur, author of “Rainmaking Made Simple” and co-author of the Declaration of Monetary Independence, and Casey Carrillo, associate editor at Bitcoin Magazine.

One of the many things that makes bitcoin such an amazing asset is our ability to take possession of our private keys. This ability is so new and groundbreaking that the Law Commission of England and Wales has written a 500-page report proposing to carve out a new form of property right for digital assets.

As I reflected on how long it took me to take possession of my private keys I realized it might be somewhat instructive for others. Since I’m a boomer and not the least bit tech savvy or inclined it took me months before I felt comfortable enough to take possession of my private keys. My thought process — which I suspect is similar to many others’ — was that I trusted a third-party exchange — which is nothing more than an IOU for bitcoin — more than I trusted myself. So my journey began when I bought a small amount of four kinds of digital assets — one of them bitcoin — in March 2020. I bought that bitcoin on a centralized exchange and didn’t know enough back then to know about private keys.

As COVID-19 wore on and central bank money printing continued at insane levels during 2020, I began to wonder and worry about the purchasing power of the dollars in my U.S. bank account. So I decided to buy more bitcoin in November 2020. It was only at that point, where I went down the proverbial rabbit hole and began to learn about bitcoin exclusively, that I learned the importance of taking possession of your private keys.

I found the whole thing confusing and intimidating so I took it slowly because there were too many choices and too many ways to mess up. There was then, as there is now, a dizzying array of hardware wallets and software wallets to choose from; everyone had their own opinion about which is best. In addition, backing up the wallet or restoring the wallet required me to know about derivation paths and seed words. None of it was familiar and I might as well have been reading Greek. I had concluded I will not rush the move to holding private keys until I felt comfortable. So I held the bitcoin I had purchased on two different exchanges until 2021.

It took me until March of 2021 to get there. Even then I had help from a young intern, Kevin, who worked with me for three months and who was also interested in bitcoin — he was actually writing his master’s thesis on the risk aspects of putting bitcoin on a company’s balance sheet. I ordered a hardware wallet directly from one of the top providers rather than through a middleman. And then that friend helped me make the transfer of some of my bitcoin in March. He showed me and one of my adult children how it works. What no one discusses in granular detail (for opsec reasons) is the best way to back up the device. That is an entirely separate article.

Okay, so far, so good. I never felt all that comfortable with having custody of all my bitcoin in one device since it represented a single point of failure so I continued to do my research on multisig. Further research and reading led me to find two bitcoin-only companies that provide multisig or vault services. Casa and Unchained Capital. It wasn’t until September of 2021 when I finally felt ready to pull the trigger and selected one of them to hold the remainder of my bitcoin in a multisig setup. That was 18 months after buying my first bitcoin.

What I think some of the more tech savvy and tech-inclined people in this space forget is just how intimidating it can be to achieve that level of ownership. Many long-time bitcoiners take for granted how steep the learning curve is for taking possession of their keys. The more tech savvy people see it as a small hill; those who have less time or desire for educating themselves see it as Mt. Everest. Plus, it requires taking responsibility for…