I believe that convenience and efficiency for Bitcoin must be built some centralization in mind, but the underlying should always be Bitcoin - decentralized and censorship-resistant.
That is for sure, to reach that peak of global use cases of bitcoin, there must be a centralized mindsets of the people to have an Concordia conceptions that everyone should be obligated to be self custodian to their funds and not just limited to that but the flexibility to accepting bitcoin for payments for the exercise and privilege of self custodian as JayJuanGee maybe prioritized.In the very beginning of accumulating bitcoin, you might not need to be a self-custodian, yet each of us should try to keep some portion of our coins in self-custodian wallets.
The power of bitcoin comes from self-custody, yet no one is forced to self-custody, yet if everyone were to hold their keys with third parties (which means not hold their own coins), then bitcoin would lose its power.
A certain amount of self-custodianship has to continue to happen for bitcoin to retain its power.
On an individual level, you are also protecting yourself from various 3-rd party risks by holding your own keys.
That is so true, you captured the very best aspect of Bitcoin: BYOB. And in the beginning, it's really very evident of the mantra, "Not your Keys, not your Coins". We have seen it at the start as I have said, Mt. Gox and then the collapse of FTX.
Although I myself went to several process, as in the beginning, I was not aware of this mantra. So there is a learning curve here, on how to manage our mnemonic phrases or private keys as it requires education on our end. And then once we fully grasp or understand about self-custodian, then we can gradually transition from holding small amounts on exchanges to wallets that we have control of. And then our confidence grows, we look for ways or practice security hygiene, like backing up our private keys, or using metal backup.
One thing that I would like to add though, is that we should also do some test recovery. I mean, if you have written your mnemonic phrase but by chance one word is wrong then you can't recover your precious Bitcoin. So when I move by coins, I tested everything first with just small amounts and the seed phrase before moving all of it to another secure wallet. The more people self-custody, the stronger Bitcoin becomes.
