This Is Why You Don't Actually Own Your Money

The Only Asset They Can't Take From You

Last week I watched a podcast interview with a guy named Juan Faro. People know him as a Spanish ex-cop turned influencer who spent years raffling luxury cars (Ferraris, Lamborghinis) for ten euros a ticket. He was arrested. Thrown into pre-trial detention. All his accounts blocked. Passport confiscated. Almost everything he owned was seized.

He spent 101 days in a cell. No conviction. No trial. No firm charges. Classified as a “flight risk,” partly because he was planning to move his tax residence to Dubai, something thousands of people do legally every year.

He walked out free. They gave him his things back. The presumption of innocence, intact on paper. His life, no longer.

His particular case has shadows. Dinners with people on police records for drug trafficking, which he himself acknowledges. I’m not here to judge the man, defend him, or turn him into a martyr. What interests me about his story is not Juan Faro.

It’s what his story exposes about what you and I, with extraordinary lightness, call “my money.”

Your checking account is not yours. It’s a promise from the bank, subject to state authorization, freezable by a judicial order signed in thirty seconds.

Your shares in your broker are not yours. They’re accounting entries in an account that can be frozen.

Your real estate is not yours. It’s recorded in a registry the state controls, attachable with a single piece of paper.

Your physical gold which many people believe is the last frontier of financial sovereignty is not entirely yours either. If it sits in a safe deposit box, they seal it. If it sits in your house, they find it. The United States confiscated private gold in 1933 with Executive Order 6102, forcing citizens to surrender it to the government below market price. That’s not a 19th-century episode. In historical terms, it was the day before yesterday.

Everything you believe you own exists because someone with more power than you has decided, until further notice, not to take it from you.

That sentence deserves to be reread slowly.

The state is not your enemy. But it isn’t your friend either. It’s the entity that holds the monopoly on legitimate violence within a territory. That’s Weber’s definition, and it’s the only one that matters in these matters.

When everything works, the state is a reasonable pact. You pay taxes in exchange for infrastructure, security, a legal system. Most of the time, for most people, that exchange functions.

The problem is that the state has a button. And that button is wired to your entire life. Politicians can press it during a fiscal crisis. Judges can press it in a poorly handled case. Bureaucrats can press it through administrative error. They can press it tomorrow, without warning, without charges, without you having any real chance to defend yourself until it’s already too late.

And when they press it, there is no patrimonial defense possible if all your assets sit inside the system they control.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s risk engineering applied to your balance sheet. The probability of it happening to you personally is low. The impact if it happens is total. And in risk management, what matters isn’t probability. It’s the product of probability and impact, and the brutal asymmetry between the two.

That’s why Bitcoin exists.

Not because of returns. Not because of price action. Not as a path to riches. Those are pleasant side effects.

The structural reason Bitcoin deserves a place on your balance sheet is this: it’s the first asset in history that requires no one’s permission to be yours, and that no one can confiscate without your explicit consent.

No state, no judge, no police force, no law can enter your wallet if you custody your seed phrase properly. It isn’t theory. It’s mathematics. Twelve or twenty-four words memorized in your head are inviolable because they exist in no physical place that can be raided.

How can this be true? Through incentives. The Bitcoin network is kept secure by tens of thousands of miners distributed around the world, each one with a direct economic incentive (the block reward plus transaction fees) to validate blocks and protect the network. The more valuable Bitcoin becomes, the more miners connect, the more expensive the network becomes to attack. Security scales with value automatically, without anyone having to decree it. It’s a self-reinforcing incentive system designed by a person or group who understood, better than anyone before them, that the only way to protect something over the long term is to align the economic interests of those who safeguard it.

And unlike gold, it doesn’t weigh anything, can’t be seen, can’t be sealed. It crosses borders at the speed of light. It’s inherited with a piece of paper kept wherever you choose. It doesn’t age, doesn’t oxidize, doesn’t dilute. The supply is mathematically fixed. Twenty-one million. Forever.

Some people use Bitcoin for bad things. Of course they do. Just as some people use cash, cars, the internet, and phones for bad things. That’s not an argument against the tool. It’s an argument against the human condition. And the tool remains net positive for the world regardless.

The most powerful real-world use case for Bitcoin isn’t transactional. It isn’t making money. It’s just one: being able to live knowing that there is a portion of your wealth that no judicial error, no banking collapse, no political whim can take from you.

That’s why the decision that matters isn’t how much Bitcoin to own. It’s how much of it you hold in self-custody. Holding BTC on an exchange is exactly the same as holding it at a bank. The day the state presses the button, your Bitcoin on Binance freezes the same way your account at any bank does.

The real asymmetry begins when you move those satoshis to a hardware wallet, write the seed onto a piece of metal, store it where no one knows, and accept the responsibility of being your own bank. There, and only there, you stop having a promise and start having property.

Juan Faro got his things back after 101 days. Good for him. The question his case leaves floating is a different one: what if they don’t give them back? What if 101 days become 1,001? What if you become a forgotten name in a court archive while your entire life depends on a button you don’t control?

Freedom isn’t what the state grants you. It’s what the state cannot take away even when it wants to.

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I usually write the article a couple of days before with whatever crosses my mind; however, I am currently on my honeymoon, so this week or this weekend there won’t be a portfolio update. I can assure you there have been no changes, and in case any Black Swan event occurs, I have all my alarms set to be able to write about it in real-time and communicate to all of pay subscribers if we have made any movements in the portfolio.