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The ‘Bitcoin Family’ has completely overhauled its security measures amid rising cases of crypto-related kidnappings, according to a CNBC report.

The family, which sold all their belongings in 2017 to invest in Bitcoin (BTC) and now travels around the world, has taken extreme measures amid a rise in perceived threats. This includes storing parts of their Bitcoin wallet seed phrase etched on fireproof metal plates stored across four continents.

The family consists of Didi Taihuttu, his wife Romaine, and their three daughters—Joli, Juna, and Jessa. The Taihuttu family gained the spotlight over the years for living a bankless life supported by Bitcoin.

Taihuttu told CNBC:

“We have changed everything. Even if someone held me at gunpoint, I can’t give them more than what’s on my wallet on my phone. And that’s not a lot.”

Bitcoin Family is not alone in increasing security measures

Over the past few months, there has been a dramatic increase in crypto-related kidnapping and extortion cases. Earlier this year, David Balland, co-founder of hardware wallet Ledger, and his partner were kidnapped and tortured, with Balland reportedly losing a finger in the ordeal.

Early last month, the video of the attempted kidnapping of the daughter of the CEO of a prominent French crypto exchange in broad daylight went viral, striking fear among individuals with substantial crypto holdings.

Following the surge in attacks, the French government vowed to increase security measures for crypto executives. This included priority access to the police emergency line, home visits, and safety guidance and briefings from law enforcement, Politico reported.

Days after the incident in France, an Italian tourist escaped the clutches of his kidnappers from a Manhattan apartment. The victim was reportedly held hostage for 17 days and tortured using myriad methods, from electric shocks from tasers to being whipped with a gun. The perpetrators, who were trying to extort the victim’s Bitcoin wallet password, were arrested late last month.

Amid the spate of kidnappings, crypto investors like the Bitcoin Family have started tightening security measures. Several of them have resorted to private security firms to hire bodyguards or armored trucks to ensure safety.

Insurance companies have also started cashing in on the opportunity, offering kidnap and ransom (K&R) policies tailor-made for crypto holders.

Taihuttu told CNBC that they’ve factored in the rising cases and reassessed their security measures. He said:

“We’ve been talking about it a lot as a family. My kids read the news, too — especially that story in France, where the daughter of a CEO was almost kidnapped on the street.”

Bitcoin Family has taken security into their own hands

Amid the undeniable growth in threats, the Taihutti family has taken several steps to ensure safety.

Among the changes was the decision to ditch hardware wallets, which were once touted as the safest way to store crypto. Taihuttu said:

“It’s a strange world at the moment. So we’re taking our own precautions — and when it comes to wallets, we’re now completely hardware wallet-less. We don’t use any hardware wallets anymore.”

The Taihutti family decided to stay off hardware wallets amid growing concerns about backdoors and remote access features. Over the past eight months, the Bitcoin family switched from hardware wallets to a hybrid system where the seed phrase was stored via partly digital and partly analogue methods.

As part of the enhanced security measures, the family has split a 24-word Bitcoin seed phrase into four sets of six words. Each set of words is stored on a different continent. This means that Taihuttu needs to make at least one international trip, depending on which set of words is required, to access the wallet. He can, however, add funds to the wallet without any hassles. Taihuttu explained:

“Even if someone finds 18 of the 24 words, they can’t do anything.”

While Taihuttu stores some parts of the seed phrase through blockchain encryption platforms, he has etched others on fireproof steel plates with a hammer and letter punch and hidden them. He has also added a separate layer of personal encryption to throw off would-be attackers by switching out certain words of the seed phrase.

The family uses the above method to store about 65% of its crypto holdings, considering it to be safer than using a centralized vault, like the Swiss Alps bunker used by Coinbase-owned Xapo. This is because Taihuttu is concerned about being able to access his funds in case the company goes bankrupt.

The Taihuttu family has also moved away from centralized exchanges, executing around 80% of its trades via decentralized platforms like Apex.

For the family’s crypto stored in hot wallets for trading, Taihuttu uses multi-signature wallets to ensure enhanced safety. He added that they treat the majority of their cold wallet savings as a pension fund that the family will only access once the BTC price reaches $1 million.

Lifestyle changes amid growing threat

The Taihuttu family has a large social media presence, with tens of thousands of followers across platforms. However, the family has been stepping away from the spotlight amid the growing threats. He noted:

“We got a little bit famous in a niche market — but that niche is becoming a really big market now.”

Taihuttu believes that the number of crypto robberies is going to keep increasing, which is why the family is making tough choices, from curtailing video shoots to avoiding France.

While the family is currently in Thailand, they have stopped posting regular travel updates and shooting videos at home. Taihuttu said:

“We stayed in a very beautiful house for six months — then I started getting emails from people who figured out which house it was. They warned me to be careful, told me not to leave my kids alone. So we moved. And now we don’t film anything at all.”

Taihuttu added that while creating content is his passion, the concern for his daughters’ safety is forcing him to stay away from the camera.

Mentioned in this article

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

I’m getting married and struggling with what is “fair” when it comes to combining incomes and sharing expenses. My boyfriend makes twice as much as I do, but isn’t necessarily harder-working or more successful (would you believe that having a PhD in a technical field can just…lead to more money?). Accordingly, he wants to pay for more of our shared expenses, like rent. I understand why this would be considered “fair” but am really resisting it.

When others pay, it feels like they’re trying to control me or encroach on my independence. Yet I do think that there is something obstinate and rigidly, falsely “feminist” in the way I insist on 50/50 in our relationship. What should I do?

There’s a very normie way to answer this question: I could advise you to make a list of all the ways your boyfriend is actually dependent on you — emotional labor, household chores, whatever the case may be — so you won’t feel like you’re disproportionately falling into a dependent role if he pays for more than half of your shared expenses. In other words, I could try to convince you that your relationship is still 50/50; it’s just that he’s contributing more financially, and you’re contributing more in other ways.

Which, to be clear, could be true! And it could be a very valuable thing to reflect on. But if I left it at that, I think I’d be cheating you out of a deeper opportunity. Because this struggle isn’t just offering you the chance to think about stuff like joint bank accounts and rental payments. It’s offering you a chance at spiritual growth.

I say that because your struggle is about love. Real love is an omnivore: It will eat its way through all your pretty illusions. It will, if you’re lucky, pulverize your preconceived notions. As the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once wrote in a wonderfully weird short story:

Few people desire true love because love shakes our confidence in everything else. And few can bear to lose all their other illusions. There are some who opt for love in the belief that love will enrich their personal lives. On the contrary: love is poverty, in the end. Love is to possess nothing. Love is also the deception of what one believed to be love.

What are the illusions that love destroys? Chief among them are things you mentioned: independence, control. Believe me, it brings me no joy to say this, because…I love feeling independent! I love feeling like I have control! And I, too, really struggle if I feel like anyone is encroaching on those things. But, alas, I do think they’re illusions that we use to shield ourselves from our own vulnerability.

No one is truly independent

Many philosophers have long recognized that, however independent we like to think we are, we’re actually inherently interdependent.

This was one of the Buddha’s key ideas. When he lived around 500 BCE in India, it was common to believe that each person has a permanent self or soul — a fixed essence that makes you an individual, persisting entity. The Buddha rejected that premise. He argued that even though you use words like “me” and “I,” which suggest that you’re a static substance separate from others, that’s just a convenient shorthand — a fiction.

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In reality, the Buddha said, you don’t have a fixed self. Your self is always changing in response to different conditions in your environment. In fact, it’s nothing but the sum total of those conditions — your perceptions, experiences, moods, and so on — just like a chariot is nothing but its wheels, axles, and other component parts.

In Western philosophy, it took a while for this idea to gain prominence, largely because the idea of the Christian soul was so entrenched. But in the 18th century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume — who was influenced not only by British empiricists but also potentially by Buddhism — wrote:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

He added that a person is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Why does this matter? Because if you’re nothing but a bundle of different perceptions in perpetual flux, there’s no “you” that exists independently of your boyfriend and all the other people you’re in contact with: They are literally making “you” in every moment by furnishing your perceptions, experiences, moods. That means the idea of a you that’s separate from others is, at the deepest level, just an illusion. You are interdependent with them for your very you-ness.

The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who died just a few years ago, had a lovely term for this: interbeing. He would say that you inter-are with your boyfriend: You are made, in part, by all the ways that his actions and words have affected you (just like you’re also made by your ancestors, teachers, and cultural heritage).

At first glance, this might seem hard to reconcile with feminism. Aren’t we supposed to be strong, independent women? How can we do that without the “independent” bit?

But take a closer look at feminist thought, and you’ll see that that’s a serious misinterpretation.

From Simone de Beauvoir onward, feminists haven’t been trying to eliminate interdependence altogether — they’ve been fighting against structurally unequal interdependence, where women have no choice but to rely on men financially because their work outside the home is underpaid relative to men, and their work inside the home gets no pay at all. That’s a nonconsensual, unequal form of interdependence, and the goal was a world where partners can meet as equals. The goal was never a world where we all live as islands.

In fact, many feminist philosophers argue that being fully “independent” is neither desirable nor possible. As thinkers like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings have pointed out, we all depend on others at different points in our lives — as kids, when we’re sick, as we get older. They champion a world that acknowledges the reality of interdependence. That would include government policies like appropriate pay for child care and elder care, as well as greater social recognition for the value of emotional labor and household chores, like I mentioned above.

But we still don’t live in that world. American society is especially hyper-individualistic. It recognizes interdependence neither on the metaphysical level (à la Buddha and Hume) nor on the social policy level (à la Gilligan and Noddings). No wonder many women are still wary of financial dependence!

Even though you live in that wider context, I’d encourage you to take a close look at the specifics of your personal situation and consider a crucial distinction: real financial dependence versus felt financial dependence. If you have your own job or could readily return to the workforce, you’re not actually financially dependent on your boyfriend, even if he’s covering more than half the rent. In that case, the real fear here is not about finances at all. It’s about facing up to the terrifying, beautiful, messy fact — a fact that love is now revealing to you — that you are and have always been interdependent.

Believe me, I know that’s not easy. It feels painfully vulnerable. Yet if you trust that your boyfriend genuinely sees you as equals — if he’s demonstrated that through both his words and actions — then at some point you’ve got to trust that he won’t weaponize your vulnerability against you. If you don’t, you will be cheating yourself out of the benefits that come with accepting interdependence. And in an important sense it will be you, not your boyfriend, who’ll be making you poorer.

Bonus: What I’m reading

Related to the idea that the self is a fiction, this week, I read a near-apocalyptic short story titled “And All the Automata of London Couldn’t” by Beth Singler, an expert on the intersection of AI and religion. I don’t want to give too much of a spoiler, but suffice it to say it contains these sentences: “Descartes’ little automata daughter, the clockwork doll that scared a bunch of sailors so much that they threw her overboard in their terror and superstition. A lovely bit of gossip to puncture the great philosopher’s pride! How dare he describe man as a machine!”

The starkest manifestation of human vulnerability is our mortality, and I wish people would do the hard work of facing up to loss instead of turning to AI-powered deadbots — new tools that, as the New York Times explains, supposedly allow you to feel you’re communicating with dead loved ones. In my experience, losing someone shatters your assumptive worldview — your core beliefs about yourself and about life — and that’s extremely painful but also extremely generative: It forces you to make yourself anew.

This Guardian article about a woman who quit her job, closed her bank account, and lives without money is quite something. I think I’d be too terrified to live her lifestyle (and I also think her lifestyle is built on a bedrock of privilege), but this bit stuck out: “I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money,” she said, “because all through human history, true security has always come from living in community.”

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