With my stash of Bitcoin, I'm the only person who knows my keys and can access my stash. That's the same generally for everyone who's got their stash in a non-custodial wallet.

But there are an number of companies that own Bitcoin¹, as well as countries. Tesla's had a huge amount of BTC (and in spite of how it's run, it's a corporation and not just Musk's plaything). All those ETFs own plenty. El Salvador's got tons of it, but the US has even more from assorted seizures.

So who's got the keys to all this?

In the world of fiat, there are plenty of scenarios where multiple people might have access to corporate funds. It might be only at a spending level -- corporate credit cards, the ability to submit purchase orders -- or it might mean access to actual bank accounts. But there's a check on this access because it's password-based and can generally be tracked. If I, as an employee, use my password to get into our bank account and transfer money, it's probably traceable to me because either I've got a unique password, or I had to log in to my work computer or corporate VPN, or because my bank account itself is trackable.

But if I have access to the keys to the corporate BTC wallet, I can transfer those coins to another wallet I own without ever going on any system that's trackable. And while those coins can be followed, there are still mixers (even if fewer than before), and hell, if I never touched those coins, they'd still be out of reach of the original owners.

Obviously, there are safeguards like multisig and transferring to new wallets and other things I probably don't know about. But all of those seem like things that could have holes in them (does anyone believe for a second that Bukele doesn't have all the keys, for example? And thus someone else might be able to find out his keys if he's ever written them down?). And ensuring that only one person has the keys leads to a potential Quadriga situation, and even with dead man switches in place, would slow business down a lot.

So how do corporations/countries ensure that their BTC stays in their own wallets?