Despite having been tweeted out in May, the above tweet didn't catch my eye until yesterday, and I thought I'd share it with you. This is a very trippy concept.

The quote is from Ralph C Merkle, one of the inventors of public key cryptography and one of eight people cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper. I first heard of the concept of Bitcoin as a living thing earlier this year, when someone I know compared block creation to DNA replication.

Like I said, very trippy. The point gets driven home further when you think about the concept of a machine payable web in which machines only need to communicate with each other to complete tasks for BTC.

To reiterate what I said last week, we have an alien technology in our hands and it will take decades to fully understand it. Hopefully by that time, we have discovered that it is a benevolent being.

Just hours ago, Fidelity officially announced that their clients can view their Coinbase Bitcoin holdings in their Fidelity portfolios. This comes months after the Boston-based money manager's CEO, Abigail Johnson, announced their intention to integrate Coinbase while giving a keynote speech at the Consensus conference in NYC earlier this year.

I love to see legacy financial institutions bringing press and legitimacy to Bitcoin and the people that have been pioneering the nascent technology in the face of heavy criticism for years. But, as we consistently do here at Marty's Ƀent, I would advise Fidelity clients to move their BTC off of Coinbase and into a personal wallet because you truly don't own the bitcoin unless you hold the private keys.

I've long had the belief that legacy finance will embrace Bitcoin + crypto, but soon after find out that their status as middleman doesn't quite work in this space. After this move, we'll see if Fidelity comes to that conclusion at some point in the future. While it is great that they are giving their clients this ability, I don't like the practice of keeping your BTC on an exchange, which this move encourages.

Final thought...

You have to be able to dive into some weird, uncomfortable territories to fully explore what this technology can do.