Tom Honzik on Nostr: 1. You care about yourself and your family, so you decide to work, earn, and save for ...

1. You care about yourself and your family, so you decide to work, earn, and save for a better future.

2. You watch the money in your bank account increase, but realize that each unit is becoming less valuable over time, because it's being diluted by other people printing more of it.

3. The work you've performed in the past is constantly worth less, which sucks. You decide to "put your money to work" by investing it.

4. The most guaranteed return on investment, U.S. treasuries (bonds etc), do not outpace inflation, and don't really solve your problem. In search of higher returns, you add a little bit of additional investment risk.

5. You put your money into a brokerage and buy stocks. Since you have a life and other work to do, you don't have the time to do the proper research on individual companies or keep up with all the relevant news. You hire others to do this for you.

6. You discover those people are taking more in fees than they are giving back to you by outperforming the market, and you would have been better off just putting your money into an index fund like an S&P 500 ETF, so you do that instead.

7. There is an economic downturn and your investments lose value at the exact same time when you need your money the most. The investment risk you took has come back to bite you.

8. There's got to be a better way. You learn about gold, which has been a fairly stable savings mechanism for thousands of years, and nobody can easily print more of it. Very attractive.

9. But you also learn that gold still has an inflation rate (which can change), and most "gold" on the market is really "paper gold." This artificially increases the supply and opens it up for price manipulation, something that is hard to fix without people taking self-custody of their gold, a substantial inconvenience especially in the digital age.

10. You learn about bitcoin, which has a set supply limit and issuance schedule, and isn't controlled by a central person or group. The supply is highly predictable and can be audited by your laptop. It also doesn't have gold's inconveniences of physical storage and lack of portability for exchange. This allows people to take self custody much easier, and all of this put together means there is less of an opportunity for sustainable abuse of "paper bitcoin."

11. Venture capitalists with questionable morality hire marketers to convince you that bitcoin is old and slow compared to their newer, shinier crypto coin. You buy into it.

12. The predatory VCs dump the bulk of the coins they had created out of thin air, rug-pulling you for substantial losses. They claimed it was decentralized, but that clearly wasn't true. Maybe you should have just stuck with your traditional money in a bank account.

13. But no, that's not good enough. You push on, and decide to learn what actually creates decentralization for a cryptocurrency so you might be able to separate legitimacy from scams. You find that the origins matter, the node participants matter, the ease with which you can run a node yourself matters, and proof of work matters. You conclude that bitcoin is far and away the most decentralized digital commodity, something that would be difficult to ever change in the favor of a different altcoin.

14. You return to bitcoin with excitement, now that you have separated the signal from the noise. You understand it is a powerful long-term savings mechanism, despite short-term volatility.

15. But how do your keep your bitcoin secure? You are wise enough to know that you shouldn't keep it in someone else's custody, such as the exchange where you bought it, or some service that promises you yield. FTX, Celsius, Blockfi, and many other examples demonstrate that is a bad idea.

16. The only alternative is self-custody. Not your keys, not your coins. You research how to hold a bitcoin key, and find that hardware wallets are the best tool to make sure your key is generated securely and is kept offline, so that nobody can remotely hack your computer and steal your bitcoin.

17. You set this up, but now have a physical item to keep track of. You become apprehensive about losing your bitcoin key, and with it, access to your bitcoin. It's a lot of responsibility.

18. You could create copies of it and store them in several places, but then you increase the risk of a thief finding one of the copies. You could add passphrases or other encoding to your bitcoin key to make theft difficult, but now you've introduced complexities that could increase the chances of losing access to the bitcoin yourself.

19. You learn that something called multisig (multiple locks protecting your bitcoin and multiple keys stored separately) can solve for both problems. It allows you to remove all single points of failure and minimize risk of theft as well as losing access to your bitcoin.

20. But all of this seems so new, technical, and overwhelming. You aren't sure if you will be able to set this up correctly, and use it without making mistakes. You are discouraged, and thinking of back-tracking to one of the options discussed earlier, and accepting the tradeoffs.

21. On second thought: no, you are stronger and more resilient than that. You shouldn't have to settle for something less than the best for your wealth. Your work. Your future. Perhaps there are services out there that can help you setup and operate multisig correctly, and with confidence.

22. You find Unchained.com, a bitcoin-native financial services company that provides education and support for multisig. You hold the controlling keys to your bitcoin, so are not subject to custodial risk. If something bad happens to Unchained, you can use your keys recover your bitcoin outside of the platform.

23. You arrange a free consultation and ask questions about the details. You decide to move forward and schedule a concierge onboarding, where you get as many 1-on-1 calls as you need, with a professional such as
myself.

24. Everything is set up so smoothly, and provides you with such confidence, that you would feel comfortable recommending the service to your less technical parents.

25. Up to this point, you've been stuck in a perpetual journey to find the solution to save for your future, safely and effectively. By now, you're practically used to the never-ending search, and the stress that comes with it. So what's the next problem you have to deal with? You think for a while. None come to mind.

26. You are finally free to return your attention to the people and things that you love.