Café Bitcoin | Self-Custody with Nick Neuman, Money Without Permission and Debanking | Day 23 of 50

Suze takes us inside the UK's debanking inquiry. A director and co-founder of Bitcoin Policy UK, she's submitting evidence to Parliament's cross-party inquiry this week, and explains what an APPG can and can't do about banks blocking lawful transactions. The numbers are staggering. The Locked Out report found roughly 40% of payments to exchanges blocked or delayed by UK banks, with one exchange reporting a billion pounds in declined transactions in a single year. All legal transactions. Even the advocates got debanked. Suze's organization goes by BPUK partly because a name containing "Bitcoin" risked losing banking services. A survey found only 14% of firms successfully opened and kept an account with one of the nine largest UK banks. Nick Neuman of Casa surprises the room with a report from inside the Coldcard response: all hands taking calls for a week, helping people rotate keys, and his estimate that far more Bitcoin moved to safety than was stolen. Why multisig held up. Neuman explains why wallets requiring multiple keys haven't been swept: attackers go after single-key wallets first, and unrevealed public keys make paired devices dramatically harder to crack. The takeaway from both hosts: upgrade to multisig. Casa has been debanked twice. When Silicon Valley Bank failed, the company's Bitcoin treasury meant it could keep operating no matter what happened to the account. His advice: keep a backup bank and self-custodied Bitcoin as a stopgap. Does Bitcoin in an ETF still count? The room digs into BlackRock lowering conversion minimums into IBIT, why the conversion mostly runs one direction, and whether Bitcoin keeps its fundamental value if real coins stop circulating. Why self-custody matters to the network, not just to you. Brady walks through the block size wars: holders running nodes are who kept Bitcoin's rules intact, and concentrated custody would hand that influence to a few large institutions. Selling freedom instead of fear. Alec raises the "sovereignty multiple," the positive case for holding your own money, and Suze describes orange-pilling her beautician by paying in Bitcoin: adoption through use, not through warnings. Lebanon, El Salvador, and Liechtenstein. Suze's reporting tour: what a country looks like after banking trust dies, holding two ideas at once about El Salvador, and a breached ownership register as the case against data honeypots.