Yes, they know that, and look for institutions that have good infrastructure and processes, like any major bank has.
None of which can be accurately compared with centralized exchanges, which run under no promise for fund safety (beyond trusting their word, lol). Not only they are caught having insecure setups, but they even engage in illegal activities like practicing fractional reserve banking with your money.
Yes, you have to trust some entity to hold your wealth. This is what people have been doing for hundreds of years, and sometimes they trust the wrong institution and get harmed by this.
But the fact is that almost everybody trusts an institution
more than they trust themselves to physically hold their life savings.
I guarantee you that a line investor at Goldman Sachs doesn't have his firm's billion dollar investment in Bitcoin locked in the top drawer of his desk.
So where does he have it? Inside the corp, in a locker? Maybe in a bank's vault? Maybe in multiple places using multi-sig? As I've already said, you can't keep your bitcoin to your name, it is simply not recognizable, neither by the state, and neither by the Bitcoin network. You either have the choice to be aware of your funds safety yourself (by protecting a seed phrase, and practicing security), or by trusting a provably incompetent stranger with no compensation in case their business goes bankrupt or gets hacked. I believe that a serious investor will go with the former.
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Huh? The Bitcoin of probably about 95% of retail investors is kept
in their own name by some broker like Binance or CoinBase or the others.
I serious investor won't keep his life savings under his mattress, or in some iPhone that could end up in a landfill. Most people simply don't want to do that.
And my example above of Goldman Sachs was a bad example since a firm like that has a billion dollar IT budget and is a certified financial institution in their own right with carefully defined processes and tracking to handle money in their organization. But most average investors--even big ones--don't have the infrastructure. They have to rent that from somebody else e.g. a financial institution.
I read your article.
Thank you
.
What's the problem with buying bitcoin and tiding it to your name? You explain why large amounts of money cannot / must not be kept anonymously, but you do not explain why they cannot be kept under your name, but with self-custody. When you buy bitcoin from a KYC exchange, you're giving up enough information to not be considered anonymous. However, nobody forces you to forfeit your custody. You can withdraw them to your wallet normally.
There's no "problem" with keeping an account representing Bitcoin in your name, and I didn't say that large amounts "cannot / must not" be kept anonymously, but rather
most people don't want to do that.
Consumers simply don't trust themselves to keep their life savings, or their home, or their car etc. physically in their possession as their sole means of possessing their major wealth. They would rather trust an institution who makes it their business to guard that for them 24/7. Yes, they can pick the wrong one, but the fact is that most Americans don't worry, on a daily basis, that somebody in the county records office is going to switch the name on their house deed making them lose their house. It's obviously quite
possible the central institution can fail, and they often do, but for 99.9% of consumers, the system works fine for them.
I have lots of worries in my life, but my brokerage account at the major broker I use suddenly losing track of my portfolio account--my life savings--isn't one of them. However, if I had my private key with my entire wealth hidden somewhere--or worse, kept physically on my own person at all times--I would be constantly worried it would be stolen a gunpoint, or lost, or dropped in a well, or whatever.
Other people might have different personalities, but I think I'm correct in saying that most consumers are like me, given that, for instance, almost nobody buys Bitcoin anonymously with only a private key, but instead they use a broker with KYC.
This is very different, however, than the way I treat the $87.50 in physical cash I have in my personal wallet right now, which I absolutely want to use anonymously--and I'm willing to take the risk of losing that cash in exchange for this anonymity. There is a place for anonymity for most average consumers for "small" amounts (the definition of "small" will depend in the person). My observation is that people want a "cash wallet" with some small slice of their wealth to spend on a day to day basis anonymously, but they want to keep the big stuff safe with somebody else.
Again, that's not everybody, but just observationally, you can see that most consumers want to treat their money that way.
