New Hampshire’s motto does not leave much room for interpretation. Live Free or Die is a statement about who is in charge of your life, and by extension, your property.
So it fits that the Granite State moved first on digital assets. It also raises a question every individual holder should be asking: if the state is serious about owning bitcoin, are you serious about owning yours?
Concord went first
On May 6, 2025, Governor Kelly Ayotte signed HB 302. It made New Hampshire the first state to pass a law allowing the state treasurer to invest up to 5% of certain public funds in precious metals or digital assets with an average market cap of at least $500 billion.
In practice, that bar means bitcoin. Texas followed in June with a strategic bitcoin reserve of its own, but New Hampshire set the precedent.
The idea behind the law is simple. A scarce asset that no single bank or government controls can sit alongside precious metals in a public reserve.
A short history of other people holding your money
The case for holding your own keys is written in bankruptcy filings and shutdown notices. Here is the short version.
- Mt. Gox, 2014. Once the dominant bitcoin exchange, it collapsed and left customers waiting years to recover anything.
- Celsius and Voyager Digital, July 2022. Both filed for bankruptcy within weeks of each other, freezing funds customers had trusted them to hold.
- FTX, November 2022. One of the best-known exchanges in the world collapsed in a matter of days.
- LocalBitcoins, February 2023. One of the earliest peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplaces shut down.
- Paxful, 2025. It announced a wind-down on October 1 and closed on November 1, giving users one month to withdraw. Its stated reasons included past misconduct by co-founders and unsustainable compliance costs.
The common thread is not crypto. It is custody.
In every case, customers had handed control to a company. When the company stumbled, their money stumbled with it.
Debanking is the same problem in a suit
Custody risk is not limited to crypto firms. Lawful businesses have reported bank accounts closed with little or no explanation, sometimes because a bank decided their industry was bad for its image.
On August 7, 2025, the President signed an executive order titled “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans.” It directed federal bank regulators to remove “reputation risk” from supervision and to act against politicized or unlawful debanking, including of lawful businesses that banks disfavor. Treasury was tasked with developing an anti-debanking strategy.
That is a step in the right direction. But an order can change how regulators behave; it cannot change the basic fact that money held by someone else can be frozen, closed or lost by someone else.
Not your keys, not your coins
The bitcoin community boiled its hard lessons down to five words. If someone else holds the private keys to your coins, what you own is a promise, not the coins themselves.
Self-custody means you hold the keys. Nobody can freeze your wallet, wind it down, or decide your line of work is too risky.
It also means nobody can rescue you if you lose your recovery phrase. That is the price of freedom here, as everywhere else.
Buying and selling without handing over the keys
The weak spot for many self-custody holders is the on-ramp. To buy or sell, most people still deposit money or coins with a centralized exchange, which puts them right back into someone else’s custody.
Peer-to-peer trading with smart-contract escrow offers another path. On non-custodial marketplaces such as Senpero, buyers and sellers connect their own wallets and trade directly with each other.
During a trade, the seller’s crypto is locked in an escrow contract on the blockchain and released when the seller confirms the payment arrived. Between trades, funds stay in the user’s own wallet. Bitcoin-only tools such as Bisq and Hodl Hodl take their own decentralized approaches to the same problem.
Freedom comes with homework
None of this is magic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Escrow cannot protect a seller who releases coins on the strength of a fake payment screenshot, and some bank transfers can be reversed after the crypto is gone for good.
Decentralized tools are not immune to trouble either. Bisq, a decentralized bitcoin exchange, had a security incident on May 1, 2026.
Prices swing hard, and the IRS still treats crypto as property, so selling or swapping can trigger capital gains. Self-custody removes the middleman. It does not remove your responsibility.
A Granite State checklist for keeping your own keys
- Choose a reputable wallet. A hardware wallet for larger amounts, a well-known wallet app for everyday sums. Download only from the official source.
- Write the recovery phrase on paper or metal. Never photograph it, never type it into cloud notes, and never share it with anyone claiming to be “support.”
- Test before you trust. Send a small amount in and out before moving anything meaningful.
- Read what you sign. Approving a smart-contract permission can give an app the ability to move your tokens.
- Trade without surrendering custody. When you buy or sell, prefer setups where your funds stay in your wallet until a trade opens, and keep every step on the platform.
- Verify money in your own account. Release coins only after the payment shows in your bank, not on a screenshot.
- Plan for your family. Make sure someone you trust will know how to reach your funds if something happens to you, without handing them the keys today.
Concord has decided that part of the state’s reserve belongs in an asset outside the banking system. Whether you follow suit is your call, but if you do, hold it the way a free person should: in your own hands.
