We've been teaching that we need to hold our private key securely and keep our money off exchanges (meaning under our own key) in order to be sovereign over our funds. Good! We've also been teaching "don't trust, verify" by running a node. Also good (but don't forget to actually connect your wallet to your own node). But in most cases, those two pillars of sovereignty are as far as our basic education program goes, branching out from there into a million different technical directions, but missing the third pillar of Bitcoin sovereignty.
When Satoshi gave us Bitcoin, the wallet was part of the software package. There was only one piece of software. It was one application that did everything. As time went on, people realized that it would be convenient to separate out the wallet logic into a separate app, which is not a bad thing at all. It allows a person to transact on-chain from their smartphone, for example, without holding the blockchain (which is now on the order of 1TB) on such a device, not to mention syncing it over a potentially costly and unstable network.
This was progress, but with that convenience of separate wallet apps, it became possible to hold bitcoin without sovereign access to the network, nor sovereign intelligence as to the blockchain. It became necessary to teach people that it is their sovereign duty to run a node, otherwise what they think they hold in their wallet under private key could become an illusion created by someone else.
I have rehashed what we hopefully know already to prepare you for what most Bitcoiners do not know yet: that the sovereign's throne has three legs, not just two. As Bitcoin grew, it wasn't just the wallet logic that moved into a separate app. The mining logic was also separated out, so that mining could take advantage of hardware improvements independently.
Educators do fine at teaching how mining works, but we have failed to teach Bitcoiners that it is their sovereign duty to continuously mine bitcoin, because that is how we assert sovereign executive power to transact. Without running your own miner, you are trusting other gatekeepers to get your transactions into the blockchain.
The introduction of new coins and the lucrative and risky business of large-scale mining has blinded sensible, conservative Bitcoiners to the true purpose of mining. We have lied to ourselves by telling ourselves that the block reward incentives and transaction fees alone are enough to ensure that our transactions will be processed.
It is not so. A handful of mining pools running an even less diverse set of nodes and mining hardware, all under the corporate-capture paradigm of government, means you are not sovereign over your bitcoin anymore. One of the three legs of your throne is owned by entities far more powerful than you.
Thankfully, good people have built tools that allow you to mine in a way that you can reassert your sovereign write access to the blockchain. That means you have the power to stamp your name on a block that your node creates, carrying transactions that your mempool policy allows, and broadcast your block to the network, all without anyone's permission. My favorite method is to run DATUM on my Bitcoin node, and point my miners there.
But the existence of the tools is not enough. Bitcoin works on the principle of consensus. That means it needs network effect. Just like we teach that there must be enough people doing self-custody, and we teach that there must be enough people running their own nodes, we must also teach that there must be enough people running their own miners.
It's not about profit or incentives. I mine not because I want to gain bitcoin, but because I do not want to lose Bitcoin. Choose the mining machine with the biggest hash rate that you are willing to foot the bill for, counting up-front cost and monthly electricity, and let the bitcoin earned be a side benefit.
Miners are the protective armies that keep transactions from being reversed. They are like the executive branch of government. They are the physical power, the tangible part of Bitcoin that has real-world consequences in terms of real energy. But for our freedom, we need to organize militias instead of armies. We need to bear our own arms, otherwise Bitcoin is just another nanny state, with some corporations having the power to "protect" you from confirming transactions that they (or their governments) deem illicit.
By distinction, the nodes are the legislative branch of the Bitcoin government. Code is law, and node runners are the ones approving or rejecting the legislative bills made by developers in the form of software releases. By distinction again, wallets are the means by which you judge between good and bad, by voting with your means, putting your money where you want. Wallets are the judicial branch.
To be a sovereign Bitcoiner--at once the chief executive, the lawgiver, and the judge--you need all three things. You need to have unilateral authority to execute a transaction and protect it from being reversed (by mining your own blocks), you need unilateral authority to decide what laws you live by (by running a node), and you need unilateral authority to judge who is worthy of your bitcoin and who is not (by using a self-custody wallet). Only with the complete Bitcoin trifecta are you actually sovereign in Satoshi's kingdom.