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Okay, we’re recording. Hello and welcome back to my podcast. It’s been a couple of weeks
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and there’s been lots of work going on. So I look forward to presenting today what I’ve
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been working on. I’m just going to pull up some notes and bear with me as I do that.
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So I’m going to just riff through it. But the title of today’s podcast, could your family
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recover your Bitcoin without you?
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Now, this is a huge question.
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And I have to rewind all the way back to 2020.
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And I’d seen this video, you know, Michael Saylor and talking to Raul Powell.
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And he’s, the title of the YouTube is something that changed my life, frankly.
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But the title was Corporate America Infiltrates Bitcoin.
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Excuse me, Bitcoin Infiltrates Corporate America.
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And wow, what a journey it’s already been in the subsequent five years.
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But I essentially fell down the rabbit hole for Bitcoin very heavily.
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And I was thinking, if I’m going to move my wealth into this thing, I need to have a backup plan.
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Like what happens if it goes wrong?
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And so that question from all the way back then is still relevant now.
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And it can be answered in lots of different ways.
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But that’s what I want to pose to you today.
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Could your family recover your Bitcoin without you?
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And if you haven’t got a confident answer to that question,
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then it’s obviously something that a needs to be fixed and b like the worst case scenario imagine
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if all your bitcoin’s gone that’s a catastrophic failure of your wealth management plan and for
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someone like myself that is working on a kind of intergenerational strategy where i received an
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inheritance my father died young what do you do with that money well you want to make sure that
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it gets to the next generation and so you’re looking to preserve it to grow it to steward it
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in as appropriate a way as possible. So I say this to you, anyone listening, could your family
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recover your Bitcoin without you? Now, today’s episode is going to dive into what that question
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means and some of the specifics around it. So please bear with me as I go through this process,
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but essentially this is going to be a process of me explaining what I believe, what I’ve built,
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and why that really matters right now.
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And I think that’s going to resonate
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with a very specific type of person
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that in theory,
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the content that I generate around this topic
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will end up in your lap at the right time,
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just as you need it.
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And this concept that the teacher appears
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when the student is ready is so true.
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Essentially, I’ve made a ton of mistakes,
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learned a bunch of things.
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And specifically around how you custody your Bitcoin,
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there is a process you can put in place that it just it makes you feel so much better and you’re
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like oh my gosh okay i’ve got this that was a very specific piece of information i needed to make this
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all work so first of all like let me define something that i’ve i’ve i’ve phrased as kind of
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bitcoin dependency and it’s like okay what happens if if your family can’t recover your
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Bitcoin without you. You don’t have a full custody plan. And actually, your Bitcoin is dependent on
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you. So maybe you’re the password manager. Maybe it’s only you that understands the recovery
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procedure. Maybe there is no documentation. Or maybe, heaven forbid, there’s a single point of
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failure that you haven’t considered. One that jumps to mind straight away is if you have a
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self-custody wallet set up with a single signature key, what happens if that key,
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either the seed phrase is lost or the key for some reason malfunctions or is burnt or gets
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flooded or who knows? That’s a single point of failure. Do you have that in your existing custody
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stack? And if so, what are you going to do about it? And the point of thinking through Bitcoin
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dependency, and again, it’s this idea that like your Bitcoin is dependent on you, is to remove
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you from the equation and the system could, what’s a better word to say, if you’re not
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able to be removed from the system, then if the system fails, then the whole thing fails
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completely.
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And you flip that around, it’s like, is your custody setup effective enough that if you
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were not here tomorrow at the drop of a hat for whatever reason, your Bitcoin is still
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going to be accessible to your loved ones?
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And so in my opinion, a lot of us that have gone deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, we
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spend a lot of time thinking about, well, why Bitcoin?
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And that includes asking, like, what is Bitcoin?
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And the great question is, like, what is money?
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And then it’s like, OK, well, when do you buy this thing?
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You know, is it the right time in the cycle?
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But then it’s like, how do you buy this thing?
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OK.
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And the next step is, like, what happens if you’re no longer around?
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and I wanted to answer that in a satisfactory manner all the way back in December 2020 before
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making my in hindsight what’s the largest purchase I made at the time and I did that and I wrote a
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document I wrote a letter set up my multi-sig vault and I chose unchained and I’m still using
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it to some degree but there were critical angles to it that I hadn’t understood at the time that
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have since become clearer to me and that’s what asking this question you know could your family
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recover your Bitcoin without you is so important to us because it’s basically stress testing things.
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And so the vulnerability is not the hardware wallet. It’s not the multi-sig custody provider.
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It’s not the, in some ways, it’s not even the exchange. It’s actually just your human error.
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It like did you make your setup too complicated Maybe you put in a passphrase on a hardware wallet that you can remember Like who knows And so it a case of okay what the trade between convenience simplicity security
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and, like, ease of access if something goes horribly wrong?
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And there’s a few other metrics that are run through that are important to think about.
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So, you know, why does this matter to you right now?
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If you’re someone out there that’s followed my podcast journey for the last five years,
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I’ve been involved in a number of different shows, a couple of startups.
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And as an investor, I really live the cycle of the Bitcoin price, especially recently,
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like the drawdown.
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What if Bitcoin draws down?
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Is that CapEx a good idea?
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Is this purchase a good idea?
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Is this lifestyle a good idea?
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And that’s another episode entirely.
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But it’s really made me sit down and think about what is it that I can bring to the world
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that’s valuable, that was valuable to me in the first place?
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and what am I seeing around me that is a problem that occurs
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that I can actually help solve for people.
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And this is what I’ve got to thus far.
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And so it’s not a case of like hardware wallets are going to fail
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or they’re dying or they’re being discontinued.
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It’s just a case of using the right one for you.
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People are sadly dying, as what happens.
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My father died out of nowhere.
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So estates, their legacy, whatever phrase you want to use it,
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inheritance, they’re actually being settled right now. And the process that people might have set up,
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they’ve used maybe trusts, or they had a company, or they had some real estate, and they’re passing
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that down. The executors of someone’s will, the way that a solicitor actually goes through this
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process, something that I had to experience very young, it’s still the same, right? It’s the state
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and a system that’s in place to remove trust issues and to give to the next generation what
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the person who has died in the way that they express their wishes. But it’s still a case like
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when Bitcoin’s involved, what does that mean? Does the lawyer know about Bitcoin? More often than not,
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they don’t. Does the spouse, you know, the wife, the husband, whoever it might be that’s not closely
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connected to the Bitcoin itself, do they know how to access it? What if it’s gone straight to the
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kids? What if they’ve never opened a wallet? What if they are a raving lunatic or a drug addict or
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whatever the case might be, there’s still going to be some nuance to Bitcoin is now part of the
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intergenerational transfer of wealth. In my opinion, it’s the best tool for it ever invented,
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but it hasn’t necessarily filtered into the system correctly. And that’s where you as the
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individual Bitcoin purchaser, owner, user, hodler, it’s on you to get your custody right,
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in case you’re not there tomorrow. So it’s the problem is already here, basically, you shouldn’t
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ignore it. And if you do, well, heaven forbid, the worst thing that might happen is your Bitcoin gets
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lost. And so it’s not a future problem. It’s happening to families right now. And in my opinion,
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if you’re ever considering moving into Bitcoin in size, this is something you have to answer first
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before doing that. And an easy way of thinking about it is a portfolio allocation. So if you’re
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buying 1% and it’s stuck on an exchange and that exchange goes bankrupt, 1%. If you’ve got
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50% of your net wealth in Bitcoin and you were to disappear tomorrow, well, if that Bitcoin’s
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not accessible, that’s a massive failure of your wealth management process. And so just to kind of
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come back to my very bittersweet story for me, to be honest, my father, he died back in 2009,
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January the 1st. Shout out to dad, obviously miss you every day. And it’s particularly difficult now
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having kids, you know, the granddad not around, it sucks, you know, it’s not an easy thing. So
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anyone out there that’s experienced grief experienced loss of a close loved one like
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heart goes out to you it’s it’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to go through
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if not the most difficult and and the only thing that’s really helped me in hindsight is time
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but to go back to dad like he didn’t he woke up one morning went to go and do his thing outside
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chopping his trees down in the forest at our house and he died he didn’t expect it to happen
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We didn’t expect it to happen.
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I suddenly got a phone call.
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I had to come home.
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And the blowout from that is like he had his affairs in pretty good order, frankly.
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Yes, there was some debt.
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Yes, that was totally manageable versus the asset portfolio.
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We ended up selling the property that I inherited as the eldest son, which wasn’t part of his
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vision at all, frankly, when you go back and look at the will that he wrote.
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But the point being is since that moment, I’ve spent the last now 17 plus years thinking
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about what to do with inherited capital. And there’s no rule book, right? You got this money,
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what are you going to do with it? And that experience has obviously shaped me hugely into
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who I am today. And as I already mentioned, I personally believe that Bitcoin is a critical
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piece of all potential avenues for intergenerational wealth transfer today. If families are moving
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money from one generation to the next and they’re not using Bitcoin, they’re really missing out.
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In fact, Bitcoin, in my opinion, should be a long-term hold that is 150% part of your allocation as someone who might be in the latter part of their life thinking about what to do long-term.
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And if you’re younger like myself, it’s like what’s actually going to retain purchasing power?
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What’s actually going to grow faster than the real rate of inflation?
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What actually has decent counterparty or low counterparty risk?
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It’s just Bitcoin ticks so many boxes on this front.
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Of course, a recent lesson being if you’re in Bitcoin in size, the volatility to the downside is extreme.
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And so position sizing is very important.
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And that one lesson from the last year that I won forget to say the least But it doesn matter what your allocation size is It doesn matter if you going to buy it or not That your decision to make
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But when you get to the point of, okay, I want to buy Bitcoin
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and I want it in self-custody, how do you do that?
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That’s a really important question to get right.
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And so in my dad’s case, I didn’t inherit Bitcoin.
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But when I disappear, my kids will definitely be inheriting Bitcoin.
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My wife might be in full charge.
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it. And the point here that I’m trying to get to is it’s been a long process of thinking about,
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like, what do I do with my money? And OK, if I think Bitcoin and self-custody is the best place
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for it to be, how do I actually ensure that when it’s there, it’s been managed appropriately?
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And heaven forbid, if I ever died or was incapacitated in some way or who knows,
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it was still accessible. Now, the cool thing here is that I have helped a number of people
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through the reallocation process already.
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And the type of dollar figure that’s moving into Bitcoin
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from everyday normal people is something that is just a classic example
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of the power of the viral and organic adoption
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that Bitcoin represents as the future base layer of money
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and a digital version of what the Austrian economists would call sour money.
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It’s epic.
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And the point here being is I’ve been helping people
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with their custody for a long time.
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I’ve been custodying my own Bitcoin for a long time.
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And it’s really important to get right.
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It’s actually pretty simple
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once you see the pieces of the puzzle put together.
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But the output is complex
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in terms of like you get this wrong
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and you don’t want to be the one
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whose Bitcoin isn’t accessible
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in the most heated moment.
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So long story short,
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when I asked the question,
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could your family recover your Bitcoin without you?
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For me personally,
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this is very much a lived experience like i’ve had to go through this myself i’ve had to ask this
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question for years on end and it’s been a slow process of tweaking here tweaking there and
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making sure i’m getting it right and so what i am building people is something i’m calling a family
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bitcoin plan so it’s not a hardware wallet recommendation for example in some ways like
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you come with whatever hardware wallet you want to use and i can help you figure that out
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it’s not financial advice like how much bitcoin you decide to buy that’s up to you what asset
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allocation you decide to have that’s up to you and equally it’s not a custody service like i’m not
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going to be holding people’s keys if anything the opposite is true i want people to be able to feel
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live breathe the autonomy that is felt by actually owning your own wealth being your own bank it’s an
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incredible thing a a geographically dispersed multi-sig uh self-custody set up with an inheritance
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plan is as bulletproof as you’re going to find for long-term wealth strategy and and so it’s the
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custody architecture like how do you set that up effectively how is it designed what are the
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recovery processes in place step by step by step you know what do you actually have to do and equally
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like, okay, suddenly you’ve died. What are the inheritance considerations? Like what happens when
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you’re gone? Have you done any form of like battle testing? And even as I sit here saying this now,
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it’s like, okay, I should really actually go back to the plan that I set up most recently
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and stress test it. Put in my calendar every six months, make sure that the stakeholders involved
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are all up to date with where it’s at. Have you identified the vulnerabilities? Like what could go
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wrong and actually this is a good example not necessarily from a a kind of price action
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perspective which has been a big lesson lately of like oh what happens if bitcoin chops in half
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this is a good one it’s like well what happens if you’re not around what happens if that wallet
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provider goes bankrupt what happens if one of these keys dies a story i was told recently of
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someone who had a two of three multi-sig setup and one of the ledgers that they had in that
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quorum of three keys just died and suddenly it was a two of two it’s like okay well that’s fine
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as long as you can move it to another two of three setup but like for a moment there if one of those
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two keys doesn’t work what’s going to happen with that bitcoin and and the output of the family
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bitcoin plan is actually a physical document so ironically in a world in which we are getting more
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and more more digital. This is something physical, and it’ll be
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printed, it’s going to be fireproof, and it will sit
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wherever you keep your most important documents. And and you
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can think of it almost like a treasure map. It’s like, okay, I
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car it tomorrow, someone can go into this safe location of mine
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that only they have access to however you get it set up. And
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they can basically find this document that’s going to show you
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how to get to the long term Bitcoin
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And so the family Bitcoin plan, like who is this for?
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Well, in some ways, it’s for me.
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Like it’s something I had to build for myself.
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And it’s something that’s been a critical piece of the puzzle on the way through this process that gives me a…
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You can be uber bullish on Bitcoin.
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You can have extreme conviction in it from a price action perspective, from an asset class perspective, from a human flourishing perspective.
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But the truly, oh, I’m going to sleep well at night comes from this layer, this additional protection.
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And so this is definitely a product for people that, frankly, you’re going to be moving six figures plus into Bitcoin.
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And you want to know that if things go piton, everything’s going to be OK.
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You going to be someone who has a partner someone who has kids or plans to have kids you going to be someone that is either already self in their Bitcoin or plans to sell a self Someone who is in
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self-custody or plans to be in self-custody, excuse me. You’re going to be someone who’s a
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long-term thinker, like Bitcoin, long-term hold. Another lesson for me recently is like
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any kind of short-term speculation and you’re in the wrong basket with the wrong thing.
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You’re not speculating, you’re long-term holding. And it might well be the case that
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you feel slightly isolated like who can you actually talk to about your custody structure
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your custody architecture as I like to say. This specific niche is something I see sitting
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alongside the existing services of a family office. An accountant for tax efficiency purposes,
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a lawyer for all the type of work that a solicitor might help with and a financial advisor. Those are
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three crucial pieces of the puzzle for people managing high net wealth accounts and people who
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may not be necessarily high net wealth but are moving large figures into Bitcoin, like that
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recovery process is crucial. The family Bitcoin plan, absolutely crucial. So who this isn’t for,
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i.e. the family Bitcoin plan that I’m going to be building people, is for someone with maybe 10
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years younger than me in their 20s playing around with Robin Hood or Coinbase and you’ve got five
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grand sitting in Bitcoin. This is not the place that you need to spend time looking at and that’s
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okay. Just as important to think about who this is for as it is to think about who this isn’t for.
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And so I’m going to start to wrap up the episode now as I’ve run through essentially,
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you know, this big question like could your family recover your Bitcoin without you? And
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The answer to that question is, I hope yes to anyone who’s listening.
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But from my perspective, it was important to have some additional infrastructure in place.
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And that piece of infrastructure I’m calling the Family Bitcoin Plan.
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And it is a product that I’m now launching to help people answer this question.
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So, you know, again, word for word, like if your family cannot recover your Bitcoin without you, you do not have a Bitcoin custody plan.
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You have Bitcoin dependency.
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or your Bitcoin has a dependency on you.
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Maybe I’m not quite saying that right.
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So what I’m launching, free discovery call.
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Like book it in, reach out to me any way you want.
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When you see some of this content filtering through clips,
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article, whatever I might’ve created, long form podcast,
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get in touch.
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And the idea of the discovery call is to see if it’s a fit.
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Like essentially the process will be by application
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and I’m not gonna work with every Tom, Dick and Harry,
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very important that not only they see value in what I’m creating, but also I need to be able to
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see value in what I can create for you. The price is going to be 4,444 US dollars. That includes
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absolutely everything. I’ll have a link in the show notes to more details on what’s included in
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the family Bitcoin plan. Like what can you expect to get out of it? And what is the final outcome
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that you will achieve? And there’ll be an additional part to this, which is an annual review. So for
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1,111 US dollars per year, I’ll do a review process. And this is actually a critical piece
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of it because yes, I’m going to be able to supply to someone a bespoke piece of Bitcoin custody
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architecture. Like who are you? How much do you own? What’s that as a percentage? Sorry, excuse me.
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I’m not going to directly ask you how much you own. I don’t want to see. I don’t want to know.
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But in percentage terms, is this 1% of your net assets or is it 50%? And that makes a big difference
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on whether or not you should invest in something like this,
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the family Bitcoin plan.
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But we can go through some coaching with close loved ones.
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We’ll get it all set up so that, heaven forbid,
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if something did happen,
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then you can be pretty certain that this will work.
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And an ongoing part of that will be an annual review.
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Like, this is not strictly a set and forget
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because hardware wallets are changing,
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multisig providers are changing,
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and frankly, families change.
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Like what’s your net assets?
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What’s your allocation percentage?
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How’s your portfolio performed?
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Are you going to actually take some profits?
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Or do you want to, you know, back up the truck?
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Because I’ve been describing recently these current Bitcoin prices and load up.
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Did you get divorced?
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Did, you know, did things change?
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Did your missus go completely mad?
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Like, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.
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But what’s for sure is you need some process to check in and get assistance.
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So not only could you potentially do this annual review that I’m mentioning, but there’ll, of course, be access possible to me on an ongoing basis if you need help.
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So I like working with audio notes, for example, which goes very well with people that I’ve worked with in the past.
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But again, it’ll be on a bespoke basis.
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So just to close things up, like not every application is going to be accepted.
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And that’s for the very specific reason, like I mentioned before, that not everyone’s going to be the right fit for this product.
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And I think it’s much, much better that I call it early doors and say, I don’t think this is going to help you rather than the other way around.
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Equally, I don’t need to know everything about you for this to be valuable for you.
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So hence, like an application process just helps to filter through to make sure that the maximum amount of value is delivered.
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Anyway, I hope that’s been interesting for you and started to answer the question, like, what happens to my Bitcoin if I’m not around tomorrow?
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and a bit about how I am going to be building a solution for that,
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for people going forward.
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So I’ll link in the show notes extra information as to what this all means.
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And I look forward to hearing from you in the future.
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Thank you so much for joining the podcast.