September 9, 2026
One of the more interesting Bitcoin stories today was CoinCorner launching a multisig vault insured by Lloyd’s of London. Lloyd’s insuring Bitcoin is significant. This is an institution associated with insuring enormous, expensive things, and now here it is standing behind Bitcoin custody. But the part that interests me isn’t really the insurance. It’s the distance. How far away from your Bitcoin are you willing to put yourself before you finally feel safe? Single signature is easy to use, but easier to lose. Multisig can improve security, but now you’ve got several devices and several keys involved. Add a company and an insurance arrangement on top of that and eventually you have to ask whether we’re securing Bitcoin or slowly turning it into something we can barely use. Bitcoin was supposed to be peer-to-peer money. At some point, security can become another kind of lock.
That question keeps showing up everywhere. The British government is warning about the “innovative” use of cryptocurrency by money launderers, which apparently confirms my long-running suspicion that human beings are hairless apes who fell out of trees with only two ambitions: launder money and build banks. Forget raising families, planting gardens, going fishing, making things, falling in love, or trying to live a decent life. No, according to the institutional imagination, we are all basically criminals waiting for sufficient bandwidth. The irritating part is the habit governments and financial institutions have developed of treating ordinary people as suspicious by default while some of the largest financial scandals in history have happened inside the institutions supposedly protecting us from financial crime.
Bitcoin seems to have made that instinct more visible. It gave people a way to hold and move value without asking permission, and suddenly the control freaks had to come out into the light. The rhetoric is always the same: money laundering, terrorism, trafficking, illicit finance. Pick the most frightening crime available and attach it to whatever technology threatens the existing gatekeepers. That does not mean the crimes are imaginary. It means we should be extremely suspicious when those crimes are used as a universal excuse for surveillance and control. And that brings us nicely to LG televisions reportedly scanning home networks and capturing audio. We spent decades laughing at the telescreen in Orwell’s 1984 because a television watching you back sounded absurd. Now the distinction between absurd fiction and consumer electronics is getting really uncomfortable.
Then we get to artificial intelligence, where researchers inside companies developing these systems are publicly warning that AI could become catastrophic. I’m not ready to jump straight from “AI is getting powerful” to “The Terminator is a documentary.” Grown men working close to these systems sounding genuinely frightened is worth paying attention to, but there is still an assumption buried in the doomsday scenario: that a superintelligence would decide humanity needed to be eliminated. We don’t know that. What may be more interesting is why we find that scenario so easy to believe. Maybe AI scares us because it is holding up a mirror. We have built governments, banks, corporations, regulatory systems, and technological platforms that routinely treat human beings as inputs, risks, data points, or criminals. Then we imagine building something smarter than ourselves and immediately assume it will treat us with the same contempt.
That may be the real thread running through all of this. We keep building structures that become so large that they stop serving human beings and start managing them. Banks become too important to challenge. Companies expand far beyond whatever they originally existed to produce. Governments write language broad enough to mean whatever regulators decide it means later. Technology enters the home and starts collecting information because apparently a television simply showing television wasn’t profitable enough. Even prediction markets are being transformed into another giant financial machine where the stated goal is becoming the most liquid venue for increasingly elaborate derivative products. Everything has to become larger, more financialized, more measurable, and more profitable. And somehow we are supposed to call all of it progress.
Maybe the bigger mistake is that we have allowed somebody else to define wealth for us. Wealth is supposed to be the expensive suit, the bank balance, the impressive title, the financial product, the pile of currency. Some of those things can certainly be useful. But a hundred-dollar bill cannot show up when your life falls apart. Your bank cannot replace the people who love you. Good soil you can grow food in is wealth. A home you are proud of is wealth. Friends who answer the phone are wealth. Family members who arrive before you have even finished asking for help are wealth. Bitcoin can be wealth too, precisely because it gives you something scarce that you can actually own. But the larger lesson is that real wealth should strengthen your ability to live rather than increase your dependence on institutions. Secure your Bitcoin, absolutely. Just don’t secure it so thoroughly that you forget what ownership was supposed to mean in the first place.
Circle P
Galaxy Mind
Website: https://galaxymind.space/
Galaxy Mind is a free Bitcoin toolset with no accounts and no KYC, built around a directory of merchants who actually take bitcoin.
Bitcoin self custody and multisig
Bitcoin privacy and financial surveillance
Bitcoin and institutional control
AI existential risk and society
Bitcoin and the meaning of wealth
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