Bitcoin is for real life

For most of bitcoin's history, ownership of bitcoin has been perceived as a false dichotomy: either fully trust a major exchange or custodian, or go it alone figuring out how to use a hardware wallet without becoming your own worst enemy. Not only does bitcoin natively support the technology that makes custody resilient, but that technology can be leveraged to build entirely new kinds of trust and financial relationships on top of the protocol itself. Every aspect of your financial life is shared with a spouse, children, advisors — so what does it look like to recreate those relationships on bitcoin as the foundation of your life savings?

Bitcoin enables you to build multisig wallets where moving funds requires multiple keys rather than just one. But this capability unlocks something beyond simple security: the ability to collaborate with other institutions and individuals in holding and securing those keys. For example, in one kind of collaborative arrangement, you hold most of the keys yourself, while a service provider like Unchained holds one as your key agent.

A key agent can't move your bitcoin unilaterally, but they can participate as one of multiple keys in the approval process. This keeps you in control of your bitcoin while gaining a partner who can help when "real life" happens: natural disasters, physical attacks, and simple mistakes become recoverable — unfortunate situations, rather than irrecoverable disasters.

There's nearly infinite flexibility in the kind of relationships you can build around the control of your bitcoin with collaborative custody. Every key is either self-managed (completely in your control) or agent-managed (secured by a service provider with a validation process for you to use it), and the power of multisig is that you can mix and match these keys in endless combinations to fit your needs. An individual might want most keys to be self-managed, while institutions or businesses might have multiple agents for multi-user approval workflows.

For most people holding meaningful amounts of bitcoin, 2-of-3 collaborative custody where a key agent holds one key strikes the right balance. In this setup, you or your business controls two keys while a key agent like Unchained holds the third, with any two required to move the bitcoin. It's important to find the right balance between security and complexity, and a properly-deployed 2-of-3 collaborative custody setup puts the emphasis on properly securing keys such that your generational wealth could be recovered even if most components were lost or stolen.

Key control is fundamental to what bitcoin is, how it works, and the new opportunities it affords. That's why it shouldn't be discarded when thinking about the various ways you might use your bitcoin — from buying and selling it to operationalizing an inheritance plan. Unfortunately, the dominant model in "crypto" treats your bitcoin simply as a balance on someone else's spreadsheet, with custody outsourced and key control abandoned.

In contrast, every one of Unchained's products was built with the principle of key control in mind:

• Trading. With collaborative custody, you can buy and sell directly to and from your cold storage, eliminating the exchange as a middleman.
• Tax-advantaged accounts. Collaborative custody enables our IRA product where you retain control over the keys.
• Commercial loans. Collaborative custody enables your business to retain control over one key when you use your bitcoin to borrow dollars against it.
• Inheritance. Collaborative custody lets you prepare your heirs as key agents in a trust so they're ready to move bitcoin when the time comes.
• Financial planning. Gannett Wealth Advisors can help with estate planning, tax planning, and portfolio management while keeping collaborative custody at the center.

Bitcoin is not a fad, but the ways people currently interface with it — centralized exchanges, ETFs, security setups separated from the considerations of your real life — might be.

The realities of bitcoin make centralized custody a risk to your wealth, and it's a risk you need not tolerate. The realities of life — death, taxes, family, the need to actually do things with your money — make isolation impractical for almost everyone. Institutions like Unchained are built for both real bitcoin and real life.