You are conflating terms and misusing English. You even do it in the question itself when you say “possession of the seed phrase”.
You can understand that if you steal a car, you don’t own that car; similarly knowing a secret doesn’t mean you own it.
The problem here is that if you start using the correct language, and accurately, your whole mental framework that’s been handed to you to contextualise bitcoin is destroyed.
No Bitcoin user owns UTXOs. UTXOs are database entries that your private key can be used on to make a signature using someone else’s public key. All UTXO’s are copied in tens of thousands of places; by no stretch of the imagination does anyone own them.
This is like saying because you have a copy of “The Godfather” on your hard drive that you own the copy. You have a copy, you don’t own the film. It’s exactly the same with Bitcoin. You control your private keys that are strings of characters. That string can be used in a mathematical function to produce a mathematical result. Information works differently to physical matter.
No one “owns” math or any string of characters; exclusive use of a secret string of characters is not “ownership”.
https://medium.com/@beautyon_/the-bitlicense-is-a-bad-idea-that-must-die-cb413c076d85
Bitcoin is special because it makes it trivially easy to conflate and superimpose ownership analogies on mathematically generated strings that have utility in a single context. Normal people need analogies to interface with almost everything in modern life, especially where software is concerned.
“Self Custody” is a multi layered analogy set, designed to help you understand how a Private Key works in the Bitcoin context without referring at any time to math or signing processes or the chain of blocks, or databases other people’s Public Keys or anything to do with the actual processes involved with who gets to sign messages and their in context meaning.
Bitcoin is never owned; it’s an entry in a massively replicated public database.
Bitcoin is never sent or received. It is reflected in the public database.
Bitcoin is not money. It is a database.
None of these absolute facts have any bearing on Bitcoin’s utility; analogies are used to help you understand and accept bitcoin as a full replacement for fiat currency and banking services.
Without this contextual help, no member of the public would accept Bitcoin, and in the end, if people can’t use Bitcoin without the need to understand it, it will never change the world at scale.
Thank you very much for taking the time to write such a comprehensive answer. Your examples has made it clear to me that you indeed can't own bitcoin. If you can't own it, how can you take self-custody of it?
Maybe you can say that you have access to a specific set of UTXOs and nobody else has.
All you have to be able to say is I can send you $50 worth of bitcoin. That’s all that’s required nothing else is needed to make bitcoin super useful to everybody. The idea that everybody has to understand bitcoin in order to use it is just crazy and they don’t apply to thinking to anything else.
I’m happy I could help have a nice day !
