We treat human error as a personal failing rather than a design constraint. And we call the whole setup empowerment, while it quietly demands users become security engineers, disaster planners, and inheritance experts.

We’ve built systems where the success case is “perfect user behavior” and the failure case is “you lose everything forever.” But bitcoin is meant to be held for lifetimes. And over a lifetime, everyone eventually slips.

Seed phrases are powerful cryptographic primitives, but they are not, in and of themselves, self-custody. Security systems that are defeated by their own usability stop being security.