📍 Coordinates: The Nest 🪺, Argentina.
📖 Reading Time: ~6 minutes.
🧉 Housekeeping: (1) We’re ~3 weeks into the Hero100. It’s been an incredible challenge so far, and the group is doing amazing. I think we’re onto something here. Stay tuned, the Warrior100 will be out in ~September. ⚔️ (2) Rooted down in Argentina after several weeks of travel. Fall weather is upon us, the days are stunning, and the maté is warm. 🧉 (3) The full Edge of Being archive is now in Substack! You can go all the way back to the first piece. (4) A new identity is coming to this publication, I hope to get it out this month. 😏
“What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” — Morpheus
The past few weeks, months, and years of global macroeconomic and financial tomfoolery have left a bad taste in the mouths of many…
There’s something… terribly wrong, isn’t there?
An unnamable, invisible virus floating around the planet. Permeating the minds of the masses.
Something so ever-present—like water to fish—you may never come to notice it.
The thing that is so fundamentally wrong, so irrevocably broken, is money.
For the past 5 decades, we have been running the most unhinged, coke’d-out financial experiment in all of human history – fiat currency.
Money created from thin air, materialized by a dark magician’s incantation. Backed only by the overwhelming threat of violence from global hegemonic powers.
We will explore this black magic in future posts. For now, this is the exit. This is Plan B.
This is how you become your own bank.
This post focuses on Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network only. Do not get distracted by alternatives. You can jump to the end of this post for the step-by-step playbook.
Whether to protect yourself from the threat of ongoing currency debasement, avoid bank runs as we witnessed with the spectacular collapse of SVB, or truly align your actions in the world with your values — the time has come to take total control of your most important asset.
“We’re talking about a change in how humanity organizes itself.” — Andreas Antonopoulos
🏦 First: What Do Banks Do?
The banking system is an emergent technology that necessarily forms to manage the Achilles heel, the fundamental technological limitation, of gold: lack of portability.
Read about the 5 essential properties of money in my previous post: Why Bitcoin is the Juggernaut of Currency.
Gold is difficult to transport over space, so it tends to naturally centralize in institutions called banks. The banks issue bank notes, which are “as good as gold” because they can be redeemed for gold.
This stopped in 1971. Bank notes are no longer redeemable for anything. For 5 decades, money hasn’t been backed (read: anchored in physical reality) by anything. This is the unhinged experiment.
A bank performs two fundamental services (+ one bonus):
Custody of Funds: banks store (and as a requirement, protect) your assets.
Payment Confirmation & Settlement: because banks control your asset balance, they also help you transact. They facilitate payments out (buying coffee with your credit card) and they facilitate payments in (receiving salary from your company). If anything goes wrong along the way, they help settle disputes.
(Optional) Provide Financial Services: Sometimes they provide other services like investment vehicles, retirement funds, multiple accounts, etc.
Banks don’t just custody funds anymore. With fractional reserve banking, they are only required to hold 10% (sometimes less!) of your actual balance. The rest is fair game for gambling.
It is the very existence of fractional reserve banking that makes bank runs like SVB possible. If banks custodied your funds 1:1, no bank runs are possible.
And because they settle your payments, they can also decline to do so. If they don’t like what you’re doing, they can freeze your account or reject a transaction.
🧐 So, Why Become Your Own Bank?
(1) True Self-Sovereignty.
If you do not control your money, you cannot be fully sovereign. Becoming your own bank gives you total control of the most powerful meta-resource in your life.
Your money is literally a reflection of your time, it’s a token of your previous life force. Controlling your money is controlling your life.
Giving people the ability to gamble with your money is like Liar’s Dice from Pirates of the Caribbean, where the bets are years of servitude aboard the Flying Dutchman. Except you don’t get to place the wager!
They are gambling with the symbolic representation of your past life.
As Davy Jones might say: do you feel that?
Give no one the ability to corrupt, steal, or devalue your life force.
(2) True Value Alignment.
This is paramount.
Most of you envision a more beautiful world. One that doesn’t include planetary devastation. Or economic slavery. Or political foolishness. You might use paper straws, go to the odd protest, or even offset your flights with carbon credits.
You must understand: there is NOTHING you can do to ‘go green’ or ‘save the planet’ that is as powerful as taking your money out of the traditional banking system.
Name anything you view as the demonic evil of climate catastrophe. The Keystone XL pipeline. Factory farming. Rainforest devastation. The World Economic Forum.
Where *exactly* do you think these companies get their funding from?
Dig into any project you despise and you will find major national and international banking conglomerates bankrolling every one of them.
If you’re a Canadian (like me), and you opposed the pipeline, you did so only in words, because your bank was funding it. Every single major bank in Canada was in on it. You see?
And here’s the kicker:
With fractional reserve banking, they LEVERAGE your money on the magnitude of 10:1. For every dollar you give, they leverage it 10x and invest that in the companies and projects you claim you oppose!
If you have any level of seriousness about aligning your actions in the world with the values you have, you must exit the traditional financial system as completely as you can.
(3) General Banking Trade-Offs
Beyond these critical blows, there are the smaller, day-to-day shenanigans you must deal with.
The loss of privacy due to KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations, data breaches, and general over-the-top invasiveness. This normalizes the rampant loss of privacy in society, which is a fundamental right in a free population.
There are the general costs, administrative baggage, and insane fees on every possible transaction and action, from saving money, to sending it, to spending it.
We have been hoodwinked into accepting this as normal. It is an abomination and an affront to human dignity.
So, let’s do something about it.
“Money and language are communication tools to enable deeper collaboration and trust, but it's all built on the cornerstone of authenticity and honesty.”
💸 Great, So How Do I Become My Own Bank?
We are going to have to replace the 2 services that banks perform: custody of funds, and payment confirmation and settlement.
In the absence of a trusted third party (the bank), how can we guarantee secure storage, and how can we validate the truth for ourselves (that I do in fact have that amount of money in my account, that the transaction was valid, and that my payment was sent successfully?)
We’ll go one by one.
(1) The ability for self-custody of assets.
The brilliance of Bitcoin is that so long as you are the only one with access to 12 secret words (or 24, depending on your setup), your assets cannot be touched.
Your 12 words are your private key. Your private key *is* your Bitcoin. No real coins exist, just entries in a ledger. What gives you the ability to update your part of the ledger? Your private key. Your private key *is* your Bitcoin.
As long as you protect those 12 words, you have complete and total self-custody of your assets. No one can move them. No one can inflate them. No one can steal them.
There is a timeless mantra in Bitcoin: Not your keys, not your coins.
You could just memorize these words in your head and have no physical trace of their existence in the material world! But if you plan on keeping any level of wealth in Bitcoin, you probably don’t want to leave it to memory.
1️⃣ Get a hardware wallet.
Hardware wallets are dedicated devices that store your private keys and sign transactions for you.
Buy a hardware wallet.
Back up your private key on a steel plate (or two), and store it securely.
(Advanced): Create a multi-signature setup with multiple devices. Only necessary when you have significant parts of your net worth in Bitcoin.
Step 1—secure custody of funds—complete.
(2) Ability to validate truth, confirm transactions, and settle payments.
This one is more abstract. You have your hardware wallet, storing the keys to your ledger entry that says you have 1BTC. Great!
How do you know that the ledger, the history you are looking at, is true? How do you know that the notification that someone just sent you $500 is real?
With banks, we trust the third party to verify the authenticity of our balances and the validity of new transactions. If you remove the trusted third party how can you confirm the truth for yourself?
2️⃣ Run a full node.
A full node is a device that has the entire history of the blockchain on it. It downloads and enforces the specific rule set that determines whether individual transactions are valid or not.
With your full node running and validating the entire history, you now have a trustless payments network running in your bedroom.
Another classic mantra: Not your node, not your rules.
You can validate the Truth at any moment. No third party is required to send/receive any amount of money, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. This is financial freedom.
Step 2—self-validating payments network—complete.
The final verse in this grand financial symphony is to link your hardware wallet to your full node.
3️⃣ Link your self-custody to your payments network.
Once this is complete, you’re done!
You have untouchable, unbreakable custody of your assets, and every 10 minutes, you personally validate the entire past/present history of a global financial network.
You can store, save, send, and receive value without relying on any third party.
You can be sure that none of your money is funding anything that doesn’t align with your values – because no one can touch your money! How do you know that? Because you validate it, every 10 minutes, with the next Bitcoin block through your node.
It’s beautiful. A living masterpiece.
“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” – Eric Hughes
Trade-Offs of Self-Custody Solutions
There are several trade-offs to this setup you must be aware of.
It’s a lot of responsibility.
It’s technical.
It’s an investment of time, energy, and resources.
There are no takebacks.
For example: I’ve had this article ready for months! But I got stuck. It took so long to publish because I had to learn how to create an anonymized bridge between my hardware wallet, desktop software, and full node. Difficult, but doable. I did it, became my own bank, and now this article can be released.
This is the cost of freedom. This is the price of admission to true self-sovereignty.
“Bitcoin is a seed of hope in a society which lost vision years ago and perspective just recently.” — Kim Neunert
📍 The Step-By-Step Process.
Acquire & Setup Hardware Wallet: Coldcard MK4. Hell yeah for Canada making world-class BTC hardware.
Download Sparrow Desktop Wallet: Sparrow. Link it to your Coldcard. Comprehensive video guide.
Acquire & Setup Full Node: I use a Raspiblitz, but recommend Umbrel. Raspiblitz guide. Umbrel guide.
Link Sparrow to Your Node: About halfway down this guide “Connecting Coldcard to Sparrow Wallet” – Coldcard guide.
Transfer BTC to Sparrow: Basic BTC transaction. See the video guide in Step 2.
Congratulations, you have now become your own bank.
Your private keys are stored in your hardware wallet, backed up on solid steel. You can engage with your wallet using Sparrow. Your full node is validating Truth every 10 minutes. Sparrow is using your node as the source of Truth.
No one has access to your funds except for you.
You validate the entire blockchain and give all permissions for asset movement.
Everything is facilitated by software/hardware you have sole access to.
This is one of the most profound evolutions of individual sovereignty in human history. The wet dream of freedom fighters throughout history. Incorruptible, private property. It is worth learning how to do this.
You can always message me here if you want any help. I’ll be releasing more comprehensive guides to this in the future.
With love, EB. 💛