Self-custody solves the ledger problem, not the infrastructure problem — and I think we underrate how far the second one has already gone

The case for holding your own keys is that a balance you control can't

be frozen, inflated or reversed by someone else's decision. I hold that

position and I'm not arguing against it. What I've been trying to work

out is what it actually covers.

Because a wallet secures a ledger entry. It doesn't secure the things

you spend it on, and those run on infrastructure that increasingly has

a remote stop built into it.

Two examples that made this concrete for me.

Las Virgenes MWD in California, 2022, installed flow restrictors on

households that repeatedly exceeded their water allocation — a machined

disc that drops the service line from around 30 gallons a minute to

roughly one. The tap still works. A garden doesn't. No court order, no

visit, no negotiation.

And Mazibuko v City of Johannesburg: prepaid water meters in Phiri,

Soweto, from 2004, where the valve closes automatically when a

prepaid allowance hits zero. It went to South Africa's Constitutional

Court, and in 2009 the residents lost. Automatic, remote,

no-appeal shutoff of a household water supply was found lawful.

The reason this belongs here rather than in a homesteading sub: the

architecture is identical to what we already argue about with money.

A meter that reads usage and a meter that limits usage are the same

device with different policy attached. It's the custodial model,

applied to a physical input.

Which is why I don't think stacking alone is a complete exit, and I say

that as someone who does it. Cold storage in a house where the water,

the power and the connection all have a remote stop in them is a

partial position. Genuinely interested in how people here think about

that gap, because I don't have a clean answer for it either.

I put the full breakdown of both cases together here:

https://youtu.be/ekU-Xugvu1U — sources in the description.