Bitcoin self custody isn't just about being a paranoid mountain man. There are many long-term negative ramifications to convincing people to trust third party custodians.

1. Centralizing coins into a few hands increases systemic risk of loss and seizure.

2. Bitcoiners get disenfranchised from participating in governance activities like running nodes or trading forks.

3. Ossification arguments are strengthened because institutions don't care about more advanced cryptographic features.

4. Permissionless scaling gets deprioritized because we can just scale via trusted third party IOUs.

Self custody is not merely important to individual bitcoin holders. It's important for the continued strengthening and improvement of the entire network.

- Jameson Lopp