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This is our weekly blog about what bitcoin really is.

Part 1 explained what problems bitcoin solves, if you have not read it you can read it here.

In Part 2 we talked about how it manages to be a great censorship resistant payment network, you can read about it here.

In Part 3, we talked about how it manages to be a great store of value, you can read about that here.

In part 4 we talk about Bitcoin’s decentralization and what it means. You can read about that here.

What is Bitcoin [Part 5]

Today in part 5 we will discuss about how Bitcoin allows you to be your own bank, and how this helps bitcoins be unseizable.

Bitcoin allows you to be your own bank, by allowing you to hold your bitcoins directly. This can be very important in a scenario where a bank bail in is possible. In a bank bail in, all the people that had holdings in the bank loose some, if not all, of their holdings because the bank mismanaged their funds. In Bitcoin, if you hold your keys, there is no way someone else can lose your funds.

Another advantage of being your own bank is in the case a government made owning certain assets illegal. The United States of America has already done something similar with gold; In 1933 the government made it illegal to own gold, and seized all the gold in the vaults of banks to bail out it’s banks. If this happened with Bitcoin, there still would be no way for a government to take your coins, unless you gave them to them voluntarily. This is why bitcoins are unseizable.

Bitcoins are also unseizable because they are just information, you could hide them on a computer, in a book, or even in a picture, without anyone noticing unless you told them. You could also just store the information in your brain and not write it down anywhere, this way you could be the only one to be able to use your bitcoins even in the case where all your other assets were seized.

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