First of all, I want to wish you all a very Happy New Year! I hope everyone is having a great start to their 2019. I wanted to share some thoughts about what I believe to be the single most serious threat to bitcoin today and what I believe we as a community can and should do to try to mitigate this threat. The threat I'm referring to is of course price manipulation and control by the legacy financial institutions via their bank backed exchanges, cash settled futures, OTC markets, and general overall financialization of bitcoin. In my opinion our goal for the new year should be for us to have a true free and open market based on supply and demand and not controlled by these systems as I believe that they currently are today. From my view the solution to this problem seems quite simple really. Since there are ~17.4 Million Bitcoin, and there are more and more dollar cost averaging HODLers, all we need to do is ensure that we start taking physical custody of our bitcoins from these firms as soon as people buy them. It's imperative for bitcoin's success that we start a grass-roots movement to reiterate the fact that simply "buying bitcoin" and leaving them in the custody of the exchanges / custody solutions that are popping up can actually end up playing right into their hand for them to control the price since regardless of how much (or little) bitcoin you own, the small amounts quickly add up and give these bank backed exchanges control over the largest Bitcoin wallets in the world and hence the price of bitcoin. Bitcoin was created for us to all have sovereignty by having a decentralized, immutable, censorship resistant worldwide currency which we don't have to ask permission to use. This system wasn't intended to fit into the current system but rather redefine the sovereign individual and finance as a whole! Main St has beaten Wall St to this first truly finite asset and they are shaking the tree hard trying to get as many as possible to sell so they can attempt to corner OUR Bitcoin market. Let's make it impossible and continue to dollar cost average and hold on to our own keys in our own wallets. Math will do the rest 😉 This is our opportunity to take the power back!