Bitcoin doesn’t kill trust, it relocates it. Inside the protocol you verify instead of trust. But the moment you touch custody, payments, swaps, liquidity, trust comes flooding back. And the weight of that trust depends entirely on who you’re trusting. Not trusting a central bank whose mandate is to debase you on a schedule is a very different thing from not trusting your own father. So maybe the question isn’t “how do we eliminate trust,” but “what’s the minimum amount of it, placed in the one person you’d trust anyway, that buys a normal human usable, private money?”

We keep answering that question wrong. Telling your mom she’s a fiat slave for not running a node is the same as telling someone they’re lazy for not growing their own wheat. I’ve self-hosted for over a decade and I’ll be honest: most people who “self-host” have bad uptime, stale software, and a security setup that would make you wince. Running infrastructure is a real job. Expecting Lightning self-custody to be the default for humanity is as foolish as expecting everyone to run their own mail server. And email, also open (decentralized) and self-hostable, still collapsed into Gmail.

So here’s what I’ve actually been doing (well a bit fancier), and it could be the solution to scaling. It’s the old “Uncle Jim” idea, but hardened with the privacy tech that shipped recently. One capable person runs the boring expensive part: Bitcoin and Lightning node, Tor, private channels, coinjoined coins to fund them, … The family and friends just hold ecash in a Cashu wallet pointed at that node. Because Cashu is Chaumian, the operator can’t see balances or even count users. They pay each other instantly and privately; they swap out to cold storage when a balance gets meaningful; receiving gets wrapped with lnproxy or BOLT12 blinded paths so it doesn’t leak the nodes pubkey.

It’s not perfect: mistakes amplify, uptime is a single point of failure (hold accounts at two or three operators), and the operator can still guess your habits. But it beats a bank account on every axis a normal person cares about.

What gives me some hope it’s natural and not just my pet scheme: we’ve done trust-based community money for centuries: hawala, savings circles, free banking. Buchanan’s “theory of clubs” and Dunbar’s 150 both suggest these things want to be small: many tiny trust-cells, not a few big banks, which is also exactly what you want for resilience and for staying off the radar. The honest counterargument is email: open protocols can still centralize at the operator layer. But money might differ, because the settlement layer underneath can’t be captured the way mail deliverability was, and people are far more desperate to escape money that’s actively robbing them or forcing them to ask for permission to use it, than email that’s merely reading their newsletters.

Keep it genuinely small and personal: your actual family, not a business with strangers. Cover costs rather than running a service, and prefer designs with no central coordinator (for CoinJoin, LN swaps, …).

Underneath all of it is one idea, which the cypherpunks and James Scott both got at: states need their populations legible to tax and control them, and privacy is just the deliberate engineering of illegibility. The one durable asymmetry an individual has. Which is why I think shaming people for not being pure is strategically backwards. Konkin called the real move counter-economics: don’t lecture the captives, build a parallel economy cheap and private and useful enough that joining it is the obvious choice. We want the grandma who’ll never run a node. Getting her onto sound, private money via an uncle she trusts isn’t a compromise of the mission. It might be the whole mission.

Curious on what people think!

https://stacker.news/items/1505172