She attends the Tijuana Institute of Technology by day, and by night works a classy adult venue downtown which is literally three blocks from the U.S. Mexico border. Gali is her nom de guerre, a pretty name that fits her personality. I was somewhere on a rooftop facing the US side when the 100 Años shots started to kick in. Gali and I got to talking. She told me her introduction to bitcoin came after a wave of counterfeiting hit the area. Accepting bitcoin became the safest form of payment, and what she imagined was just a temporary solution, insurance from faux fiat, uncovered a rabbit hole.
“El dinero se convierte en lenguaje,” she found at its bottom.
Money becomes language—maybe that’s what the mad queen and her wrenches were scared of.
This hit me full blown and edged in rose red. It’s brilliant. It encapsulates rather simply several theories I’ve considered about bitcoin’s hereafter. I remember sitting there locked in a brainy daze for an uncertain length, because when I snapped out of it, Gali was gone. I waved the waiter over to inquire about my missing interlocutor, and he pointed with his chin behind me. Gali suddenly came into my periphery, and sat back down across from me, wearing the Cheshire Cat’s smile. She’d been in the bathroom speedballing chalk, and it was myself, apparently, lost in some dream, that handed it to her after she asked for it.
Eventually property becomes a first-amendment issue. And for those not plugged into American Exceptionalism (I’m not American by the way), that means money will become indistinguishable from speech—a civil right—globally. Bitcoin is a civil right. I see no way in which that doesn’t happen. Bitcoin pushes us closer to The Merge (a term shitcoiners for whatever reasons would have you believe is something to do with Proof of Stake), and we’ve seen cool little shades of the real Merge elsewhere. Consider for example, how cypherpunks in the early 90s were able to break to bits proposed bans and suppression of cryptography—by turning it into language, dashing tyranny via freedom of speech. Or what’s currently happening with the 3D-printed gun CAD files. It’s no longer a second amendment issue, but a first amendment right. And even the most liberal states can’t draft effective legislation, let alone get anything passed without a Federal court rebuttal. The real question becomes, how can you stop it anyway? How can you stop language? You can’t. Certainly not in private. You can try suppressing it in public to mixed results under regimes that over time become more and more symbolic, like tax laws are, higher and higher tax rates, which fewer and fewer wealthy people pay,
So all this got me thinking and questioning the entire process we’ve come to accept in randomly generating 12-24 word seed phrases, along with multi-sig, and other complexity we go out looking for as individuals (businesses and groups are different). Gali explained her living arrangements don’t allow for keeping backups stamped in metal safely. By instinct, after hearing this, I sat back into the lounge couch spreading both my arms in the attitude of a Cuban refugee made famous on the big screen in the 1980s, and offered to buy her a Coldcard, an Mk4, the new one that allows PSBT’s with NFC instead of microSD’s. Ooh la la. She declined the offer. I sat back in a half-hunched position, and from here I’ll forgo my erstwhile pretense and translate what she said into English directly:
“I already memorized it, my seed phrase, front and back. So did my mom and sister. But we all use a different passphrase.”
“And you all use the same—”
“Naked seed phrase for family stuff,” she finished my thought, “we all have the Xpub for it,” and she held up her phone, of which BlueWallet takes up mega-bytes on.
Her and her sister, I learned, already had Ledgers.
On the schlep back to NYC, I had plenty of room to turn things over in my mind on a mostly empty Spirit Airlines flight. Here’s a picture of my own pathetic self custody situation below:
It’s a mess. It’s stupid. It’s inherently created its own security risks. Less than a week ago, I could actually picture myself with a shovel in relief of an empty moonbeam burying these things several feet deep in the ground. That’s barbaric as fuck.
“Simplicity is a fundamental security practice,” the Greek bitcoin educator Andreas Antonopoulos often preaches.
I don’t know any of my seeds. Their random generation gave them plenty of entropy sure, but not one of them is part of me. If a flood or tornado takes my home and bank from their foundations, then what good is entropy when I’ve lost all access to my bitcoin? If cops show up to my bank with a warrant and gas tools, then kick in my front door, I lose most of my net worth when they seize it. If some douche invades my country causing my currency to go to zero, and banks close permanently, do I want to be lugging seed plates across borders or in backpacks with thousands of strangers and variables around? This is a story as old as bitcoin itself. People constantly getting their shit seized by “authorities”, people losing their seed phrases, people storing their seed phrases and getting robbed. Every day there’s a new post on the r/btc sub or the rekt Twitter page about it. A better microcosmic example might be a father & son [ethical] hacker duo I know out of New Hampshire that deal with recovery of lost bitcoin; they have a 6-month backlog and business has been consistent since they started circa 2019.
I’ve been guilty of going out and looking for complexity. Multi-sig for personal wallets, adding entropy with dice rolls to my random generated seeds, and a general paranoia that I learned stems from one simple fact: I AM NOT SOVERIGN, for my bitcoin exists in the meat space, it’s not bonded to me as language.
Tijuana changed me. After getting home I dumped all my seeds and all their metal-stamped backups. I dumped all the 7z 256-bit files with their own seeds that protected my bitcoin seeds. I stopped keeping hard wallets with separate seeds. I consolidated everything into one wallet, with one memorized seed, then cloned the hard wallets, and set a strong passphrase. Sure, for small amounts and spending wallets I don’t bother memorizing seeds because I use BIP85, and even use centralized services like Strike and CashApp, but for my bitcoin, the relevant 99.9% of it, which is about 75% of my net worth, the keys exist in my head as language. Inviolable. Holy fuck do I feel better. Sovereign. And although I transact often using one of these cloned hard wallets, the keys have never touched a computer or an internet connection because I use the hard wallet’s PSBT feature. Below is a 3-picture progression:
GOOD
BETTER
BEST
Bitcoin is a civil right. This is the very reason why CBDCs which are based on behavioral economics which leverage big data and efficiency will ultimately fail. It’s why we’ll look back on governments printing and minting money as absolutely ludicrous. It’s why borders will disintegrate. It’s the means by which the political class gets demonetized, eliminating their ability to print and make war. It’s the very center sovereign computing leverages to eliminate SAS, putting personal servers the size of credit cards with the difficulty of TikTok in everybody’s hands, creating a mesh network and eliminating ISPs. It’s where a circular economy builds giving rise to a parallel system which allows people for the first time in history the ability to opt-out, which competes with public debt, challenging the way states organize. It’s how the billions of us here on earth end up speaking the same language (the one we transact and communicate in), closing the 200k year globalization cycle of human beings.
My child and I share the same seed. She uses a separate and very strong passphrase. We decided this would be our tax-free and trust-free inheritance scheme until a better solution comes along. As well, we agreed to keep a small amount of Bitcoin on the mutual naked seed as a security precaution, so that we would instantly know if the seed was compromised (because an attacker would purloin the bitcoin), or in the event of a wrench attack, or if something shady in general happened to either of us we’d know on zero day. The Xpub for this naked seed is on my phone, and on hers as well.
From a psychological standpoint, this whole seed sharing thing has connected us in a way I didn’t anticipate—not sure I can even elucidate it properly—but I was shocked when she echoed a similar sentiment without me ever bringing it up. It’s not like sharing a bank account or credit card with someone. The centralized and permissioned structures there have sterilized humanity of its sovereignty by proffering safety in return for their freedom. It’s much more classical, something forgotten, an Edgar Allen Poe thing is happening with us sharing these seeds, except it’s the exact opposite of paranoia and fear, whatever it is, it’s very eery and very healthy, I’d feel alien without it.
