Privacy, community, and money (with Renata Rodrigues & Fedi)
Ideas to take with you.
- 01
Self-custody and third-party custody are not the only two options – community custody, where a chosen group of guardians validates transactions without seeing them, is a third path that mirrors how village savings circles have worked for centuries.
- 02
Privacy-as-default flips the Western framing: instead of fighting to claw privacy back, you start private and choose what to reveal, because convenience always wins when privacy is the harder path.
- 03
Circular economies don't begin with merchants accepting Bitcoin – they begin with a service that's better or cheaper than the legacy option, which gives people a real reason to convert local currency into Bitcoin in the first place.
- 04
Reputation is non-portable in a small community, which is why village elders can be trusted with a metal box of cash and why guardian sets who know each other carry their own kind of cryptographic strength.
- 05
Decentralized building is slower and more constrained than centralized building – you can't track users, you can't see their data, and every component has to glue to every other component – which is the price of not becoming the next institution people stop trusting.
