Oddbean new post about login | logout What percentage of people that hold bitcoin will self-custody it 15 years from now, do you think?
More than today. People will figure out it’s much easier than they thought.
Same share of the number of people that store gold bars at home.
Nah, too pesimistic. Bitcoin has its advantages over gold, its incentives, and that is not to be underestimated. I would say in the hyperbitcoinized places, where it is the main currency in fluctuation, 100% of families with stable electricity and internet at home will have their own Umbrel or similar lightning node at home. Custodial will only be as backups (when you leave home and your node is suddenly down) or for convenience for small expenses to be coupled with Visa cards or something like that.
Self custody is getting easier. I will always do it and show others how. Until then, the rugs will continue.
10-15%
After 15 years, it's going to be basically self-custody, because technology is going to make it easier for people to self-preserve. But there will certainly be more accounts that require KYC than there are now. Maybe most of them are KYC accounts.
In 15 years, self-custody will be as easy & straight-forward as using your smartphone today. The entirety of Gen-Z & Gen-Alpha will be nearly 100% self-custody - They will proliferate self-custody further to the other generations.
Trick question. If you don't self-custody you're not holding bitcoin.
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I would hope it increases as self custody advances and eases with time. I don't expect that to be on the first layer. nostr:nevent1qqs9sxan76spfkfghpzcz3ra7rz6xt9aqqlq6wflx5knellw0g4mv5qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfdupzp64suatdx2uqhn2xfu7cgjuqgqcrqadp864uxkv6wckf43atj860qvzqqqqqqylsa0he
i am not too optimistic. hopefully the world learned something from the paper gold supressing it´s price. but there are a lot lazy morons and boomers around who rather buy GBTC (looking at Bitoin T.I.A.A. here (he lost the "N" by now officially)) or companies like MicroStrategy that are using a service provider/ custodian for legal reasons. so I go with 20% selfcustody, 80% in "functioning" bank deposits hopefully protected by western law. i´d rather would see it the other way around to be honest.
I suspect the vast majority will only transact and save on a yet to be conceived L2.
5-15% might be able to. Perhaps somewhere in the middle there.
Depends on how robust L2 solutions are by then and/or how expensive/cheap it is to hold bitcoin on-chain.
On one hand, better tech will make self-custody easier, somehow mitigating key loss. Also, I think Fedi styled custody will be important for saving on fees. Base layer custody will probly not be the norm, IMHO. Those who HODL >1 or 2 BTC today will have some important decisions to make: serve as a bank, hold deep storage, UTXO management. Over all, I think fees could make self-custody difficult for the average person who wants +/- $30K of BTC in his portfolio. We will probably see some kind of scaling according to net worth of BTC (least to greatest wealth): Lightning, Liquid, Fedi (or some such), ETF, broker custody, self-custody. Liquid isn't very popular now, but I see a lot of potential in it.
I'm going to say a low number, not because I don't think you should self-custody. But because I think adoption will be pervasive in 15 years, and a lot of people will rely on 3rd parties to custody. Hopefully some will be trustworthy. So...3%
Percentage of people holding it in 15 years, or from the people that hodl today? If it's the first, I'd say less than 1%... How many people run their own servers? And with tx fees at 50$ (or more, in 15 years), I don't see much self custody. Also, if one has a utxo of such value in their cold storage, maybe think about consolidating before it's too late, otherwise it will be useless. Imagine the "useless utxos", those of less than the current fees. Has anyone counted them?
Less than today. People don’t want to learn. They want convenience, and have grown used to regulated custodians regardless of the risks.
Good question. In 15 years, people will be more technologically adept. We’ll also experience more frauds like FTX along the way, which will keep reminding us “not your keys, not your #bitcoin.” There will be more elegant multi-sig solutions available. The older folks that store it with e.g. ETF custodian will also grow old and pass away. My prediction is that if you have a meaningful amount relative to your wealth (whatever that is in 15 years from now) you’re likely to 80% self-custody and 20% service-custody. Any small amounts will be service-custodies as the payments will work better with L2s and L3s.
Depends on how society evolves. People tend to need to get burnt before they take action. Similar to how people only install an alarm system after having been robbed... never to be robbed again. If the current system continues to "work" than many won't be bothered to self custody. However, If major banks start to fail and states continue to blatantly censor/control people's ability to transact privately, then perhaps we'll see an uptick in people taking responsibility and become self-sovereign. Unfortunately it will take something major, most people are still under the impression that state and money are a match made in heaven and cannot grasp why it isn't so (or don't cause their pay check depends on them not understanding it).
I think over75% as long as new solutions come out for your average non tech consumer. Bitkey is a step in the right direction. What if Apple one day offered their own solution? A lot can happen in 15 years.
Listening to Bob Burnet on the latest “what bitcoin did” podcast, he talks about how the scarcity of block space makes it mathematically impossible for all people on earth to self custody. It would take 40 years of transactions to disseminate btc on the base layer to everyone on earth. This brings up the question of self sovereignty vs community self sovereignty. For example, is a person really self sovereign if they have btc only on Lightning because base layer block space is finite.
Your question is why I hold bullion (all shapes and sizes) over BTC. I have hard-drives from over 20 years ago but what I created then (e.g. manuscripts for hard-copy books) has diminished value in today's content platforms (tweets, tick-tocks etc). It will take hope and partisan persistence to ensure your platforms and exchanges survive the next 15 years, knowing THEY will come after you in all shapes and forms. Don't give up bitcoiners.
About 30% - 35%
What percentage of people will self custody bitcoin in 15 years do you think?  I think all. Here’s why. The family is the cell of society. So if one person in the family — call him bitcoin grandad — gives a day’s wage of bitcoin to the children, godchildren, nieces, nephews, brothers-in-law, and grand-babies on birthdays or other life events by a dozen words on a metal plate, they are self-custody, even if passively. Even the skeptics don’t throw the words away. This is happening in now, or can be, in your family, if but one person steps up.
1e-7%
1% I think most circulating bitcoin will be in lightning channels. Think of them like "roads" between financial institutions in time and space. Most people will store their money in non custodial lightning wallets similar to today's bank accounts. Due to a wide adoption of bitcoin, transaction fees will be too high for most people to be feasible to store their money onchain.
20% That's being pessimistic about the future of civilization & politics, however. If society doesn't have a huge collapse somehow, then it'll just be like 2%.
Less than 99% because https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/death-rate
100%
Because people who don’t self-custody won’t have their Bitcoin.
Way more than today.
"Hold" means self custody.
If we are still at war with the fiat system, then 100% of those that oppose it. It would be easy to think it would be less, but the old legacy system will be still fresh in our minds. As the years go by, then trusted centralized custodians will offer their benefits. Future education of our children is paramount to avoid sleepwalking back into a centralized world again.
Those who currently self-custody Bitcoin will likely continue to do so 15 years from now, because they know the cost. Many new users, will choose fancy ETFs or other abstractions. This choice is often driven by the ease of use and a strong habit to delegate financial responsibilities to third parties. It's interesting to know how many people self-custody Bitcoin in El Salvador.
My guess will be 20%. The majority of Americans today do not even self custody their currency. In other countries, cash still works. We can also look at trends in the "unbanked," but this example focuses on those who already use banking in their country and jurisdiction. The financial system will create derivatives of Bitcoin, just like it did with gold and silver, and any other commodity/asset. To gain dollar price exposure to these derivatives, and speculate, people would have to trust custody of their Bitcoin to banks. Many HODLers today, are waiting for some astronomical dollar price, so they can sell or leverage their Bitcoin. However, no lending entity would lend with no collateral, which means losing custody.
It's not yours if you don't self custody. Everyone else will get rugged, leaving only the people hodling their keys with #bitcoin So, 100%
100%. Because 15 years is enough for devs to simplify the complexity. People won’t even notice they self-custody.
I think the number of people who own bitcoin that self custody would be maybe in the 20-30% range. I think it really depends on how unstable and confiscatory governments get and how obvious it is to the general public. If the average person doesn't think their government is going to steal their bitcoin then they will probably hold it in a bank for peace of mind.
No first version of anything tends to stay as market leader in long time frames. Some other chain/project will surpass it in 15 years. Likely some improved version of Monero.
Even though I love self-custody, it really is a huge sense of responsibility. You have to desire self-sovereignty for it to be worth the perceived extra stress. I think that what Obi is doing with Fedimints (where someone personally connected to you is self custodying the bitcoin for a group of people but not every single person needs to learn it in depth) is going to be more scalable. I hear people say that self-custody is going to get "so simple" but the more I hear that the more trust is involved. If the people taking self-custody don't understand the basics for how to vet whether a self-custody solution is actually secure, eventually you are going to have a herd of people fall victim to marketing campaigns about self custody that aren't actually self custody. Imagine for example how many people who own ledger hardware wallets are 1) not aware of the private key backup recovery they use on some devices and 2) wouldn't know why that was an issue even if they did know. The simpler you get with self-custody the easier it will be to push people into unsafe products in my opinion.
Without a major protocol change? Effectively no one. I’m assuming in 15 years we’ll have hyperbitcoinization. With 200M transactions/year, the average wait time for 8 billion users is going to be in the ballpark of 40 years. The only people that will be able to use the block space are those willing (and able) to pay for it
