Bitcoin Depends on Someone Who Doesnt Care

Dependencies on Uninvested Third Parties

This memo is published by CustodyStress, an independent Bitcoin custody stress test that produces reference documents for individuals, families, and professionals.

What It Means to Not Care

Custody arrangements sometimes include parties whose involvement is required but whose interest in the outcome is minimal or nonexistent. When bitcoin depends on someone who doesnt care, a fundamental misalignment exists between the holder's stakes and the other party's stakes. The holder has everything riding on the arrangement functioning correctly. The other party may have nothing at stake—no financial interest, no reputational risk, no consequence if things go wrong. This asymmetry shapes how the arrangement performs under stress.

This analysis covers custody dependencies on parties without meaningful incentives and why such dependencies create vulnerability regardless of how well the arrangement works during normal times. Parties who do not care can neglect, delay, or fail without suffering for it. Their indifference is rational given their incentive structure, but that rational indifference becomes the holder's problem when it manifests as unreliability.

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What It Means to Not Care

Not caring does not require malice or ill intent. It means simply that the party has no stake in whether the holder's custody arrangement succeeds or fails. They may be perfectly pleasant, may have agreed to help, may even want things to go well in some abstract sense. But wanting things to go well differs from having something to lose if they do not. Genuine caring—the kind that produces reliable behavior under stress—emerges from consequences that affect the caring party directly.

Incentive structures create caring. A cosigner who owns a share of the bitcoin cares because failure costs them money. A professional fiduciary cares because failure creates liability and reputational damage. A spouse cares because family finances are shared. Someone with no financial stake, no professional obligations, and no personal investment in the outcome may wish the holder well without having any reason to prioritize the holder's needs against competing demands.

Abstract goodwill proves fragile under pressure. When the holder needs urgent cooperation, the party without stakes faces a choice between helping the holder and doing something else. Whatever else competes for their attention has no counterweight in stakes they hold regarding the holder's situation. They may help if convenient; they may not help if inconvenient. Nothing in their incentive structure pushes them toward reliability.

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How Dependencies Form on Uncaring Parties

Custody arrangements often include parties selected for convenience or availability rather than alignment of interests. A friend agrees to hold a multisig key because they were asked and saw no reason to refuse. A family member accepts custody materials without understanding the stakes involved. A service provider accepts users without any particular investment in any individual user's success. Each involvement creates dependency without creating reciprocal stakes.

Initial agreement does not imply ongoing caring. The friend who agreed to help years ago did so at a moment when the request seemed minor and the relationship felt strong. Neither condition may persist. The request that seemed minor then may matter enormously now. The relationship may have cooled. But the structural dependency remains locked in from the moment of setup, regardless of how conditions have changed.

Selection based on trust obscures incentive analysis. The holder trusts the other party, so the holder does not think carefully about whether the other party has reasons to perform reliably. Trust feels sufficient because trust is how personal relationships work. But custody arrangements are not purely personal relationships; they are systems with dependencies that will be tested by circumstances that may not respect trust. When the test comes, incentive structure predicts behavior better than trust history does.

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Behaviors That Emerge from Not Caring

Delay results from competing priorities. The holder needs a signature urgently; the uncaring party will get to it when they have time. Their timeline for "when they have time" is governed by their own priorities, not by the holder's needs. A request that sits unaddressed for days or weeks seems unreasonable from the holder's perspective but perfectly reasonable from the perspective of someone who has no stake in prompt resolution.

Neglect of responsibilities follows naturally from absence of consequences. Maintaining custody materials, keeping signing devices functional, staying accessible—each requires ongoing effort. Effort directed toward something with no personal payoff tends to diminish over time. The uncaring party may let their signing device battery drain, may forget where they stored materials, may change contact information without notifying the holder. None of these neglects costs them anything, so nothing prevents them.

Withdrawal of participation becomes easy when circumstances change. The uncaring party's life shifts—new job, new location, new relationships—and participation in the holder's custody arrangement no longer fits. They can withdraw without financial penalty, without professional consequence, without any loss except perhaps some awkwardness in the relationship. The holder cannot compel continued participation from someone who decides to stop participating.

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The Holder's Perspective Versus the Other Party's

From the holder's viewpoint, the custody arrangement is critically important. Significant value rides on it. Access to funds for emergencies, inheritance for family, financial security—weighty stakes that deserve serious attention from everyone involved. When the holder asks for help, they are asking for something that matters enormously to them, and they expect the other party to treat it with commensurate seriousness.

From the uncaring party's viewpoint, the holder's arrangement is one of many minor commitments accumulated over time. They agreed to something, sure, but they agree to many things. A favor for a friend takes its place among other obligations, most of which have stronger claims on their attention because those obligations carry actual consequences for them. The holder's request, however urgent it feels to the holder, registers as a low-priority item on a long list.

These perspectives collide when cooperation is actually needed. The holder reaches out expecting engagement; the other party responds with delay or disinterest that reflects their actual priorities. The holder experiences this as betrayal or unreliability; the other party may not even register that they have failed to meet expectations. They were never going to prioritize the holder's needs because nothing in their situation made the holder's needs a priority.

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Where Uncaring Parties Appear in Custody

Multisig arrangements frequently include uncaring participants. Friends, relatives, or acquaintances agree to hold keys without sharing in the bitcoin those keys protect. They have no financial stake; their cooperation is favored by the holder but not required by any mechanism that affects the keyholder directly. When the holder needs their signature, these participants respond according to their own schedules and priorities.

Service providers at scale exhibit structural indifference. An exchange with millions of users cannot care about any individual user's situation. Support requests enter queues; resolution follows timelines set by operational efficiency, not by user urgency. A holder with an urgent problem is one of thousands of users with problems, none of whom matters enough individually to warrant exceptional treatment. The service provides what it provides according to its own constraints.

Professional advisors engaged for one-time assistance may lose interest once the engagement ends. An attorney who helped set up a trust has moved on to other clients. An accountant who filed past tax returns is not following the holder's ongoing situation. These professionals were engaged, performed their work, and disengaged. Future questions about their past work compete with current paying clients for their attention. The holder's dependency on their prior work does not create ongoing caring on their part.

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When Indifference Becomes Crisis

Routine operation masks how much the arrangement depends on cooperation that cannot be compelled. During normal times, nothing tests whether uncaring parties would actually perform when needed. The arrangement sits dormant, apparently functional, with vulnerabilities hidden by the absence of demands. Everyone assumes things work because nothing has proven otherwise.

Stress exposes the dependency. A death requires rapid action; the keyholder does not respond promptly. An emergency demands access; the service provider follows standard procedures regardless of urgency. A legal deadline looms; the advisor who helped with setup cannot recall the details and has no incentive to dig them up. Each stress scenario reveals that the holder's needs do not create obligations that uncaring parties will meet.

Crisis timing often coincides with reduced social capital. The holder needs help during a period when they are least able to invoke relationship obligations—they are grieving, they are incapacitated, they are represented by someone else who has no prior relationship with the uncaring party. The social dynamics that might have prompted cooperation when the holder was present and able to advocate for themselves evaporate when the holder is absent or diminished. The uncaring party's indifference operates without any counterweight.

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Scenarios of Caring Deficits

A holder dies and their executor contacts the friend who holds a multisig key. The friend does not know the executor, feels no obligation to this stranger, and has other things going on in their life. They agree to help eventually but do not prioritize it. Weeks pass without action. The executor cannot compel faster cooperation and has no leverage beyond appeals that the friend finds easy to defer. Estate administration stalls on one person's casual timeline.

An exchange suspends a holder's account for a compliance review. The holder submits required documentation; the exchange processes requests in order received. The holder's urgency—medical bills due, opportunities expiring—is invisible to the support queue. Other users with less urgent needs but earlier submission dates get processed first. The holder waits alongside everyone else, their stakes irrelevant to an institution that processes requests according to operational logic.

A holder becomes incapacitated and their spouse attempts to activate an inheritance protocol that involves a third-party service. The service requires verification procedures designed for fraud prevention. The spouse cannot meet the verification requirements quickly because of documentation the incapacitated holder cannot provide. The service follows its procedures without exception; exceptions would create liability. The spouse faces a system that does not care about their particular circumstances.

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Outcome

When bitcoin depends on someone who doesnt care, the custody arrangement contains asymmetric risk that operates entirely against the holder. Parties without stakes in the holder's outcome can neglect, delay, withdraw, or simply lose interest without suffering consequences. Their indifference is rational given their incentive structures but creates vulnerability the holder cannot eliminate without removing the dependency itself.

Dependencies on uncaring parties form through convenience, availability, and trust that substitutes for incentive analysis. Initial agreement does not create ongoing alignment of interests. What felt like reliable commitment at setup may prove to be casual willingness that evaporates when tested. The holder's stakes do not transfer to parties who have no mechanism to share in those stakes.

Crisis exposes what routine operation conceals. The absence of consequences for uncaring parties means they respond to the holder's urgent needs according to their own priorities, which place the holder's situation far below whatever else commands their attention. The holder who recognizes this dynamic sees their custody arrangement differently—not as a network of reliable supporters but as a system with dependencies on parties whose cooperation cannot be compelled and whose caring cannot be assumed.

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System Context

Examining Bitcoin Custody Under Stress

Bitcoin Heir Training and Capability Gaps

Multisig Complexity Family Inheritance

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