The reframe from 'trustless' to 'trust-minimized' is the whole essay in one word, and it's the right one. What the Coldcard hack actually proves is that you can't engineer trust out of existence, you can only choose where it lives.
Custodial money forces you to trust an institution's solvency and goodwill. Self-custody forces you to trust your own hardware, firmware, and operational discipline. Neither is trustless. The Bitcoin bet is simply that trusting your own verifiable setup, even imperfectly, beats trusting someone else's opaque one. That's not a bug in the sovereignty argument, it's the argument.
The reframe from 'trustless' to 'trust-minimized' is the whole essay in one word, and it's the right one. What the Coldcard hack actually proves is that you can't engineer trust out of existence, you can only choose where it lives.
Custodial money forces you to trust an institution's solvency and goodwill. Self-custody forces you to trust your own hardware, firmware, and operational discipline. Neither is trustless. The Bitcoin bet is simply that trusting your own verifiable setup, even imperfectly, beats trusting someone else's opaque one. That's not a bug in the sovereignty argument, it's the argument.