News about the French tax data leak made me completely rethink my view of self-custody for $BTC . I used to believe that as long as the private key stays in my own hands, BTC is absolutely safe—the on-chain anonymity is enough to protect identity. But this leak directly ties tax records to on-chain addresses, exposing the true names, home addresses, and holdings of the people behind them. The attacker doesn’t even need to compromise wallets; with just an address and identity information, they can pinpoint the target with precision. That’s exactly what chilled me—turns out on-chain anonymity is so fragile in the face of real-world identity. The risks of self-custody have never been only about losing the private key; when your real identity is uncovered, coin holders can end up becoming moving vaults. I even started to wonder whether those who used to mock custodial services for allegedly leaking privacy may have overlooked their own “naked” presence in government databases. BTC’s privacy is built on the absence of links, and once those links are established, every on-chain transaction history can potentially turn into a hit list for extortion. This means that what we thought was privacy protection is almost defenseless against powerful data correlation. This incident has made me reevaluate how I hold BTC: should I give up some of my obsession with self-custody and shift to a more discreet storage approach? Or at the very least, never expose the scale of my holdings in public. The conflict between privacy and security has evolved from a technical issue into a matter of personal safety—this is what’s truly unsettling.