So what. Most people can be taught to use a floor safe, too. That doesn't mean people will start pulling their life savings out of the bank and putting physical cash in their own homes.
There's nothing wrong with using a company to help you guard your wealth.
What does this have to do with any of the things I said? I never said it is wrong, although I would never put my Trust into a Third Party 'guarding' my Wealth. I argued it is dubious for newcomers to learn to be under full control considering we got so used to getting helped at least partially any where we go.
My point was that, even if you could theoretically teach people to do something, that doesn't mean they will want to do it. It also doesn't mean they are better off doing it.
Most people should keep their life savings in a bank or other financial institution--and that's what most people do. Keeping your life savings physically on your person, or in your house etc. has got all kinds of risks associated with it. Most people aren't prepared for these risks, and there's no reason they should be since there are products out there that are very, very safe, relatively speaking.
I get that there are some people who still do it--hence my comment about the floor safe--but most won't.
But I completely disagree. Self-custody is not a niche product and I dont think that most holders nowadays use a broker to hold their bitcoins.
Based on the hundreds of billions of dollars stored in the major brokers like Coinbase, Binance, and so many others, I think the evidence is strong that most Bitcoin today is held by professional organizations in the business of holding people's Bitcoin.
No, I do not think thats true at all. As far as I know, all blockchain analytics show that centralized exchanges
only hold about 11% of the total Bitcoin supply. Its true, that is a significant portion of Bitcoin held on exchanges, but thats far from most. As for other "professional organizations," how can you claim that they don't hold their Bitcoin in self-custody?
Interesting. Has there been chain analysis showing the distribution of wallets? In particular, I would wonder what percentage of (say) Wallets with more than .1 btc would be held in self-custody. I suspect that number is very low.
Also, by self-custody here, I mean an ordinary individual person holding their physical keys on their person. An organization would have the same infrastructure that a centralized exchange would have, give or take.
And as for ETF investors, they are not exactly Bitcoin investors, are they? ETFs are financial products that track the performance of an underlying asset, in this case, Bitcoin. Yes, they provide exposure to Bitcoin, they dont offer direct ownership of the cryptocurrency.
The ETFs hold actual Bitcoin, so yes, they are exactly the same for purposes of this discussion. Indeed, most people possess Bitcoin (no matter how) "to provide exposure to Bitcoin" e.g. as an investment. The ETF is just a different means of doing the exact same thing.