The Rise of the Neo Family Office

How Self-Custody Bitcoiners Are Reclaiming Financial Sovereignty

The guy’s name was something like Dave, and he lived in a beige-colored house on a street where every other house was also beige.

He had a perfectly fine but boring job. The interesting thing about Dave wasn’t his job, or his house, or his overgrown lawn. The interesting thing was happening in his garage, right next to a stack of vinyl and a pile of old National Geographic magazines.

There, on a metal workbench, sat a small, plastic device that looked like a USB stick from the early 2000s. To this device, Dave was performing a ritual. He wrote down a list of twelve random words: ocean, whisper, gravity, atlas… onto a sheet of paper. Then he stamped those same words onto a small plate of titanium, using a five-pound hammer and a set of steel letter punches. He was careful, methodical, like a watchmaker assembling a Swiss movement. The whole process took him nearly two hours. When he was done, he had secured a sum of money that, on paper, made him wealthier than his entire beige-colored …