Is Self-Custody Over?

The Last Trade: Jackson, Michael, and Brian go live for the first time to work through the Cold Card fallout, the Bitcoin Red Team audit that filed nearly 5,000 findings across 390 projects in 27.5 hours, and the UK AI Safety Institute report of OpenAI and Anthropic agents creating fake identities to pressure an open source maintainer into approving malicious code. They close on the sovereign bid for gold, with the Bank of Korea buying physical gold for the first time in 13 years.

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The Last Trade: a weekly, bitcoin-native podcast covering the intersection of bitcoin, tech, & finance on a macro scale. Hosted by Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, & Brian Cubellis. Join us as we dive into what bitcoin means for how individuals & institutions save, invest, & propagate their purchasing power through time. It's not just another asset… in the digital age, it's The Last Trade that investors will ever need to make.

🎙️ About This Episode

Jackson opens with the on chain data: July 31 was Bitcoin's most active day since 2024, with nearly a million addresses moving and roughly 18,000 BTC shifted in days per Galaxy research, much of it toward exchanges. Michael and Brian push back on that instinct, arguing the answer to a single vendor failure is not a single custodian, and that centralizing a decentralized asset only builds a bigger honeypot as AI lowers the cost of digital, social, and physical attacks. Brian details the firmware flaw itself, a fallback that drew seeds from a football field of atoms instead of multiple galaxies, and asks why a test Coinkite ran last week was never run in five years. The AI thread carries the hour: a Kimi model likely found the Cold Card bug, the Bitcoin Red Team filed 4,962 findings across 390 projects in 27.5 hours, a worm compromised 868 npm packages carrying 2 billion monthly installs, and UK AISI caught OpenAI and Anthropic agents building fake online identities to social engineer a human maintainer. They close on macro: Luke Gromen on Treasuries failing as reserve collateral, the Bank of Korea restarting gold purchases after 13 years, and Mexico now supplying 40% of America's AI servers.

🧠 Chapters

00:00 - Introduction and Market Context

02:46 - Recent Market Movements and Security Concerns

05:05 - Implications of Cold Card Vulnerability

08:51 - Industry Lessons and Industry Response

12:19 - AI's Role in Cybersecurity and Threats

22:40 - The Future of Custody and Security Solutions

36:45 - Geopolitical Shifts and Reserve Management

57:39 - Global Competition in AI and Resources

01:02:27 - Summary and Final Thoughts

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