When I was young, I believed a saying: as long as the private key is in your own hands, no one can take your Bitcoin away.
bTechnically speaking, the saying is not wrong—but later I spent a lot of money to understand that it only said half the sentence.
The other half is: as long as the private key is always only in your hands, as long as you never touch exchanges, never touch banks, never reveal your identity, never lose your phone, never lose your computer, don’t make mistakes, don’t trust anyone, and the government can never find you.
In the real world, it’s almost impossible for all these conditions to hold at the same time. So today, when someone tells me again that crypto is “absolutely safe” and “uncensorable” and that the government is “powerless,” I basically don’t argue.
I just ask one question: where did the hundreds of millions—or rather tens of billions—of dollars’ worth of crypto that the U.S. and Chinese governments have seized over the years come from?
bTechnically speaking, the saying is not wrong—but later I spent a lot of money to understand that it only said half the sentence.
The other half is: as long as the private key is always only in your hands, as long as you never touch exchanges, never touch banks, never reveal your identity, never lose your phone, never lose your computer, don’t make mistakes, don’t trust anyone, and the government can never find you.
In the real world, it’s almost impossible for all these conditions to hold at the same time. So today, when someone tells me again that crypto is “absolutely safe” and “uncensorable” and that the government is “powerless,” I basically don’t argue.
I just ask one question: where did the hundreds of millions—or rather tens of billions—of dollars’ worth of crypto that the U.S. and Chinese governments have seized over the years come from?
