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Here's What Nobody Tells You

About Tony Yazbeck

Tony Yazbeck is a Lebanese Bitcoiner who lived through the 2019 Lebanese banking collapse, waking up one morning to find his savings, ATMs and credit cards all frozen overnight. That personal collapse pushed him from fiat life into Bitcoin, and eventually into building a company around helping others avoid the same fate.

The Bitcoin Way is a hands-on self-custody advisory firm that walks clients step by step from zero knowledge to fully sovereign: Bitcoin self-custody, cyber-security (hardened phones, de-Googled operating systems, VPNs, password hygiene) and jurisdictional plan-B residency. The team operates on a full Bitcoin standard, refuses fiat payments, and focuses on open-source, air-gapped, verifiable tools rather than shortcuts.

This conversation is worth watching because Tony ties the abstract Bitcoin case to a lived collapse story and then moves directly into concrete operational advice: what hardware, what setup, what mistakes people make, when to consider multisig, and why 2026 may be the last clean window to get a plan-B in place. It is less ideology and more field manual from someone who has already been through the worst case.

What was said

1. 06:00 Tony opens with the day his accounts were frozen: he went to bed after dinner with friends and woke up effectively homeless with $70 in his pocket and a country's banking system gone overnight.
2. 11:00 He describes the warning signs he missed - 15% interest on USD deposits in Lebanese banks and then credit-card limits silently dropping from near-unlimited to zero within days before the peg to the dollar snapped.
3. 21:00 The Bitcoin moment: months after the collapse, he stumbled on an Andreas Antonopoulos talk and smiled for the first time in months - he credits that video with pulling him out of survival mode.
4. 37:00 Concrete surveillance example - he recounts the story of an HSBC customer getting locked out of his bank app because the phone had a password manager installed, as an argument for de-Googled hardware and sandboxed apps.
5. 42:00 On plan-B residency he names Central America (and parts of the Middle East) as the jurisdictions his firm is currently focused on, and warns that for many people plan B is about to become plan A or plan 911.
6. 57:00 His non-negotiable self-custody criteria: open-source or verifiable-source, Bitcoin-only, fully air-gapped hardware, plus running your own node - without the node you are not verifying, you are still trusting.
7. 62:00 On multisig vs single-sig: he tells beginners to start with advanced single-sig and only move to multisig once they are fluent, because multisig failures are usually user-error, not protocol risk.