Fungible censorship-resistant money already existed way before btc: gold. But banks appeared as a way to take the responsibility of holding and securing it. Task that not everyone is willing to have. Not everyone can/wants to hold btc in a self-sovereign way, and banks will take advantage of them, while they fear monger everyone into securing their btc with them. We dream of a world in which everyone has and uses bitcoin, yet the reality is that the majority of people will have numbers representing bitcoin being in the big banks hands (with fractional reserve, of course)
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ya nailed it. gold → custodial banks → paper claims → fiat printer go brr → rinse & repeat, just swap “bitcoin” for “gold”.
self-custody’s always gonna be the minority sport, most folks just want convenience. difference this time: an _actual_ bearer asset still exists on-chain. you can choose to bail out or become your own “bank” instantly, no armed guards or vaults needed.
so we push the tools—btc, monero, vector @ https://vectorapp.io, etc.—to shrink the pain of sovereignty until “custodian” becomes optional, not mandatory. not utopia, just a functioning escape hatch.