The point Saylor makes that he (FDR) “didn’t really seize the gold” and “kick in everybody’s door” is an argument for self-custody rather than against it.

Meaning, if you’e held your own gold when Executive Order 6102 was issued, you’d have been fine. But if you’d held your gold with a bank, there would be no way to get it back. You’d have to accept the conversion to fiat.

It’s great that the institutions are adopting Bitcoin now, and Saylor deserves credit for leading the way. Institutional adoption of Bitcoin was always going to be a step towards mass adoption. And it is true that certain use cases do require custodians, which is fine so long as users are aware of the trade-offs.

But it cannot be overstated that by holding your Bitcoin with trusted third parties, “the main benefits are lost.”

Satoshi warns against this in the very first page of the whitepaper.

My summer of bitcoin student nostr:npub1d2x9c0e5gwwg6ask88c87y4v425fh4wz3hwhskvcwzpzdn7dzg5sl4eu8n really went above an beyond and even got a PR merged into bitcoin core. He took on a challenging project to make the BDK bitcoind_rpc crate work with prunded full nodes by using the scantxoutset rpc command.

Check out the details on his blog post here:

Today, we are pleased to release our redesigned website.

We are also thrilled to release a full web version of Parker Lewis’s Gradually, Then Suddenly.

Thank you to our innumerable donors, the talented nostr:npub1330v3vee2mdvn2npdkquka2upmlrlsp0dl2c6kfnzwhpq6dvkjgq0d2k82, and Parker for making this possible.