Three bank cards have been sitting in her mother’s purse since she was ten. She’s never seen a single one of them.
Zhang Jiaqi is 22 this year. She won gold in the women’s synchronized 10-meter platform event at the Tokyo Olympics, alongside Chen Yuxi. At 13, she swept the individual and synchronized titles at the National Games. The 810,000 yuan in prize money never passed through her hands—it went straight into her mother’s account.
For all the years since, her prize money and salary have followed the same route. She wanted to take some of it out to learn about investing and buy a home in Beijing. Her mother shut her down with three words: “You don’t understand.” In the end, she was living alone in an old Shanghai apartment, renting by herself. Truly alone.
Her mother responded yesterday. She said the home was bought with the couple’s savings, and they borrowed the rest from her own father. Her exact words were: “I didn’t touch a cent of hers. I’ve kept all her money untouched.” She was pretty adamant. But the comments section didn’t let it go. People asked where the couple’s savings came from when they hadn’t had steady jobs for years. For now, that’s just speculation from online commenters; the show hasn’t presented a single account statement. No one has seen how much is left in those three cards.
I’m not judging this mother and daughter. Outsiders can’t really see the whole picture when it comes to a family’s finances. What I’m focused on is something else: who holds the cards.
A lot of people think that if money is held in an account under your name, it’s yours. Look, the name is just bookkeeping. The card is the key. No matter how nicely your name is written down, if someone else has the key in their pocket, even checking your balance at the counter means asking them first. That difference is easy to miss in everyday life. The day you want to move your money, it becomes the whole difference.
The crypto world has proven this point more than once. Balances on exchange screens fluctuate even more than bank balances. They can look like real money—until the day you hit “Withdraw” and find out those digits have been living in someone else’s wallet all along. Mt. Gox was like that. FTX was like that. When Celsius froze withdrawals, users’ account balances didn’t drop by a single digit, but they couldn’t get a cent out.
So what’s the difference? There’s just one dividing line: do you have something in your hands that lets you move your assets yourself at three in the morning, without asking anyone? If you do, that’s self-custody. If you don’t, that’s a limit someone else has given you—and they can change it at any time.
People often ask me: if you copy your seed phrase onto paper and lock it in a drawer, does that count as self-custody? It does. But if that piece of paper is locked in someone else’s drawer, it’s no different from Zhang Jiaqi’s three cards.
The way I see it, custody is ultimately a question of the ledger. Whoever can unilaterally use the funds is the owner. Whose name is written on the contract comes second.
No one can say what state that piece of paper or those three cards are in now. The production team didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and her mother never gave a figure. The most important box in this whole story is the one left blank.
One more thing. When you see family drama like this in the news, don’t just pick a side. Take a look at the accounts on your own phone. That card in your name—when was the last time you actually held it yourself?
If you get it, follow me. I break down this kind of ledger all the time.
$BTC $ETH $XRP
#自托管 #Private Key
Zhang Jiaqi is 22 this year. She won gold in the women’s synchronized 10-meter platform event at the Tokyo Olympics, alongside Chen Yuxi. At 13, she swept the individual and synchronized titles at the National Games. The 810,000 yuan in prize money never passed through her hands—it went straight into her mother’s account.
For all the years since, her prize money and salary have followed the same route. She wanted to take some of it out to learn about investing and buy a home in Beijing. Her mother shut her down with three words: “You don’t understand.” In the end, she was living alone in an old Shanghai apartment, renting by herself. Truly alone.
Her mother responded yesterday. She said the home was bought with the couple’s savings, and they borrowed the rest from her own father. Her exact words were: “I didn’t touch a cent of hers. I’ve kept all her money untouched.” She was pretty adamant. But the comments section didn’t let it go. People asked where the couple’s savings came from when they hadn’t had steady jobs for years. For now, that’s just speculation from online commenters; the show hasn’t presented a single account statement. No one has seen how much is left in those three cards.
I’m not judging this mother and daughter. Outsiders can’t really see the whole picture when it comes to a family’s finances. What I’m focused on is something else: who holds the cards.
A lot of people think that if money is held in an account under your name, it’s yours. Look, the name is just bookkeeping. The card is the key. No matter how nicely your name is written down, if someone else has the key in their pocket, even checking your balance at the counter means asking them first. That difference is easy to miss in everyday life. The day you want to move your money, it becomes the whole difference.
The crypto world has proven this point more than once. Balances on exchange screens fluctuate even more than bank balances. They can look like real money—until the day you hit “Withdraw” and find out those digits have been living in someone else’s wallet all along. Mt. Gox was like that. FTX was like that. When Celsius froze withdrawals, users’ account balances didn’t drop by a single digit, but they couldn’t get a cent out.
So what’s the difference? There’s just one dividing line: do you have something in your hands that lets you move your assets yourself at three in the morning, without asking anyone? If you do, that’s self-custody. If you don’t, that’s a limit someone else has given you—and they can change it at any time.
People often ask me: if you copy your seed phrase onto paper and lock it in a drawer, does that count as self-custody? It does. But if that piece of paper is locked in someone else’s drawer, it’s no different from Zhang Jiaqi’s three cards.
The way I see it, custody is ultimately a question of the ledger. Whoever can unilaterally use the funds is the owner. Whose name is written on the contract comes second.
No one can say what state that piece of paper or those three cards are in now. The production team didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and her mother never gave a figure. The most important box in this whole story is the one left blank.
One more thing. When you see family drama like this in the news, don’t just pick a side. Take a look at the accounts on your own phone. That card in your name—when was the last time you actually held it yourself?
If you get it, follow me. I break down this kind of ledger all the time.
$BTC $ETH $XRP
#自托管 #Private Key