Guest: Your Bitcoin IRA Is Not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card | Adam O'Brien
Bitcoin Well PodcastAdam O'Brien has spent thirteen years trying to subtract counterparties from his life: the bank, the exchange, the custodian, anyone who could freeze, lend out, or lose his bitcoin. This summer proved that subtraction has a floor. The ColdCard entropy failure drained $116 million from people who did everything right, generating their own seed on a trusted device. The Liquid Network lost $320 million without a single key being stolen. Neither failure involved a custodian.
In this episode, Adam walks through what he calls the counterparty ladder, a six-rung framework running from captured legacy retirement assets all the way to bitcoin purchased privately in self-custody, and makes the case that the real question was never "is this trustless," it's "which rung am I actually on." That framework is also the foundation for something Bitcoin Well is launching: a Bitcoin IRA, held custodially through BitGo, with a self-custody option coming after. Adam explains why a company built on non-custodial principles is launching a custodial product, what it would take for him to call the IRA a failure, and why he chose to say the quiet part out loud in the very article announcing it: a retirement account holds captured funds no matter what's inside it, bitcoin included.
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Bitcoin Well is Canada's non-custodial bitcoin company, established in 2013 and publicly traded since 2021 ($BTCW.V). We offer Bitcoin ATMs, personal bitcoin services, and an online bitcoin platform.
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