
Read_872 - Erosion of the Meaning of Custody
By Guy Swann
Aired Mar 3, 2025 · 30m · Last boosted Mar 10, 2025
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Nicholas Dorier brings us a short piece that is very relevant to many of our challenges today, being clear and precise about the definition of the word custody. As we have seen for decades, the political sphere is almost designed to destroy and confuse the definition of words for the explicit purpose of broadening power, and creating enemies and criminals of anyone who gets in their way. But an even greater dilution of the term has come from within, as new "layer 2" systems compete to be seen as the next major leap forward. Are they really, or are we...
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The question is, do you have the ability to exit by yourself?
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Important topic right now and a nice, concise definition for custody. I found myself with a few unresolved questions though. here's one: the distinction between technically-present non-custody and **effective** non-custody. The piece mentioned that a user's technical competence is _irrelevant_ to the definition of custody. "They can get a friend to help". I mostly agree, but I can imagine a situation where a user who has "technically-present non-custody" is permanently precluded from their unilateral exit because the technical knowledge, hardware required, time investment needed, etc. far outstrips their own resources and their entire social network's ability. I'm stuck on this because it doesn't break the definition of non-custody in the framework presented here, but it renders the non-custody property effectively moot. I'm happy to just accept that this is how reality works; some properties may be technically present but effectively out of reach, and that's still a better world than one where the properties don't exist at all. But I have to also acknowledge that every superstructure built to provide access to the technical property is itself a liability on the _effective_ access to the property and there is no way around this in a world of limited resources and lumpy distribution of agency/leverage. ...I thought I was going to keep this short, but I already failed at that and might as well mention another problem I had: "as long as you have all the data you need locally on your device, you have non-custody". Again I technically agree, but it introduces another point of custody: your device's custodian, if one exists. Are you using a mobile OS that has a way to censor what you're able to access on it? If so, the "local data" doesn't have perfect unilateral exit/exfiltrarion. This is a different flavor of the "superstructure of access" I mentioned above. Its tradeoffs all the way down, since the underlying property in question (UTXOs) is dependent on a comp…

















