The crypto lunatic fringe have long frustrated me with their assertions of sovereign this and that.

There is no sovereignty in crypto if YOU ARE NOT BUILDING YOUR OWN HARDWARE.

Any claims of sanctity or reliability in the software stack are rendered null and void until someone with a tunneling electron microscope has completed an audit of your chips.

THIS is why Taiwan matters so much, people: there is NO sovereignty for as long as your chips are being imported. You can trust all you want - but trust is nothing without verification. We are all serf-subjects of the wafer-producing overlords.

Ledger clearly drank the koolaid. Crypto people: invest in hardware. NOT software. Anything less is utter futility.

not your keys, not your crypto

not your hardware, not your keys

not your chips, not your hardware

not manufactured in house, not your chips

not your designs, not manufactured by you

not designed by you personally, not your designs

ad infinitum. To be truly secure, you must first learn to survive alone in the wilderness and smelt tin

I don't get what you are saying here re no sovereignty with no (custom) hardware.

Grab the Bitcoin white paper and an airgapped PC with a fresh Debian install.

Implement the algorithm(s) in the white paper to generate yourself a private key and then a wallet address from that.

Send bitcoin to that wallet. Write down the private key and wallet address, store it somewhere safe, bury it in the garden, whatever.

No special hardware is required for any of this...

Or am I missing something?

Seems like maybe crypto having a single point of failure (keys) is a problem rather than hardware.

You will never be completely secure against failure, the only way to protect yourself is to be able to robustly recover from failure.

I'd rather be able to say "every single government is in my hardware and they still can't touch it."

Perhaps possible with multisig, but now you're basically back to trusting banks.

That's an impractical stance, there's always another layer down.

Supply chain risk is real, and it has to be managed in realistic terms.

For me, this is the weak link in the chain for digital assets, and always has been, but the mitigation is simple: no one hardware wallet should have millions of dollars of assets on it. Split it up, and use different techniques, different vendors, with different supply chains.

Not sure what you mean? Taiwan, imported, isnt taiwan the biggest exporter of high end chips? 100% these have not been hacked in Taiwan. You mean setting up your own fab? I am confused