“If somebody gets control over your personal AI — all your health data, all your financial data, all your emails, everything you've thought about — they own you.” Jesse Posner built FROST threshold signatures and shipped BitKey at Block. Now he's building Vora because he realized individual self-custody is still a LARP — and the stakes are about to get much higher.

Episode Summary

Most people think a hardware wallet means they've solved self-custody. Jesse Posner spent years at Coinbase and Block learning exactly why that's wrong. Without a full node, your wallet leaks your balance and IP address to third-party servers. Without physical security integration, your keys are one wrench attack away from worthless. Without verifiable hardware, your entire setup might be compromised from the factory floor.

Vora is building the integrated answer: a sovereign device combining a full Bitcoin node, air-gapped hardware wallet, tamper detection, and emergency response — all designed so that attacking a Bitcoiner becomes more expensive than it's worth.

But Posner isn't stopping at money. He argues the next frontier of self-custody is your mind. As personal AI agents accumulate our most intimate data — health records, financial decisions, private thoughts — whoever controls that AI controls the person. Vora's “guardian AI” architecture uses hardware-backed isolation to guarantee that no prompt injection can reach your most trusted model, while still letting you harness frontier cloud models for non-sensitive tasks. The same cypherpunk principles that protect Bitcoin keys now protect the most valuable asset of all: your autonomy.

About the Guest

Jesse Posner is CEO and co-founder of Vora, a startup building Bitcoin-grade self-custody for both digital assets and AI. A trained lawyer turned cryptographic engineer, Posner spent over four years at Coinbase on key management, then helped build BitKey at Block. He created the first BIP-340 compatible implementation of FROST (Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures), supported by a Brink grant. His work sits at the intersection of cryptography, constitutional law, and physical security — bringing an unusually broad lens to the question of individual sovereignty in the digital age.

• X/Twitter: jesseposner
• Nostr: jesseposner on Primal
• LinkedIn: Jesse Posner
• GitHub: jesseposner
• Company: Vora

Key Quotes

• “We wanted to make self-sovereignty real — where you can control your Bitcoin, maintain your privacy, protect yourself from physical attacks, and resist government seizure.” — Jesse Posne
• “If somebody gets control over your personal AI, they own you. You could literally lose control of your identity.” — Jesse Posner
• “The nation-state system is like a dead man walking — the ground has already shifted and we're just seeing the slow collapse.” — Jesse Posner

Key Takeaways

• A hardware wallet without a full node is a privacy leak: Every time your wallet checks your balance through a third-party server, it reveals your UTXOs and IP address — giving attackers a map to your Bitcoin and your front door.
• Self-custody must include physical security, not just key management: Vora integrates tamper detection, time-delayed spending, and emergency dispatch into the custody system itself, making the economics of attacking a Bitcoiner unprofitable.
• FROST threshold signatures eliminate the privacy and cost penalties of multi-sig: Traditional multi-sig reveals your entire key setup on-chain. FROST produces a single signature indistinguishable from a solo signer, with the ability to refresh, revoke, and add key shares without moving Bitcoin.
• Your personal AI is the next self-custody frontier: As AI agents accumulate intimate personal data and gain the ability to act on your behalf, controlling that AI becomes as critical as controlling your keys — and the same cypherpunk architecture applies.

Timestamps

• [00:00] Introduction and Jesse's background at Coinbase and Block
• [03:16] How institutional vs. individual self-custody differs
• [06:30] Executive Order 6102 and constitutional resistance to government seizure
• [09:05] Physical security: integrating alarms, tamper detection, and emergency response
• [14:31] The $5 wrench attack problem and why it gets worse as Bitcoin appreciates
• [17:53] Why a full node matters for privacy — your wallet is leaking data
• [22:48] Supply chain attacks and the case for verifiable hardware
• [27:23] Trusted execution environments: powerful but not impervious
• [32:40] How FROST threshold signatures work and why they matter
• [39:29] Proactive security: refreshing key shares without moving Bitcoin
• [44:37] Self-custody of AI: why controlling your mind is the next frontier
• [48:58] Prompt injection attacks and the “lethal trifecta”
• [52:47] Guardian AI architecture: hardware-isolated models that can't be corrupted
• [54:57] Fiduciary AI: confidentiality and undivided loyalty in a single concept
• [1:06:02] Vora's product roadmap: AI product this year, Vora Vault next year
• [1:09:34] Why the modern state has already collapsed — topos and nomos
• [1:14:24] Five-year vision: sovereign hardware, personal drones, and a renaissance of human flourishing

Resources & Links

• Vora — Bitcoin-grade self-custody for digital assets and AI
• FROST Implementation — Jesse's BIP-340 compatible FROST in secp256k1-zkp
• Brink — Open-source Bitcoin development funding (supported Jesse's FROST work)
• Bunny's hardware verification research — Non-destructive chip imaging for verifiable hardware
• Distrust / Enclave OS — Security contractors building the isolation OS for Vora

Podcast

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• Music: More Ghost Than Man