Madagascar said:
Has anyone ever considered holding general USD on their cold wallet? With the threat of financial institutions to go rogue with your money and being hesitant to literally convert everything to Bitcoin, I am trying to think of alternatives in a scenario where banks are no longer trustworthy at all.
The US dollar is like a melting ice cube. Think about the fact that about 40% of the dollars that have ever existed have been created in the last 2-3 years. It is the best house in a bad neighborhood.
In contrast, while this is by no means a perfect analogy, you could think of bitcoin as a form of digital gold. While approximately 2% new gold is discovered every year, bitcoin has a fixed maximal supply of 21,000,000. Also, the amount of new bitcoin that miners can produce decreases programmatically every four years. In the year 2140, there will be no more bitcoin to mine.
This programmatic feature of bitcoin tends to produce a supply shock which results in an increase in bitcoin's price and a subsequent crash to a new floor price that is at or near the maximum price at the prior four year cycle.
Combine this with the fact that, unlike gold, bitcoin can be easily stored and transmitted virtually instantaneously at a very low price, and you can see why it is appealing to people.
Plus, if you can remember a sequence of 12 words, you can take your bitcoin with you anywhere in the world and nobody can take it away from you. They can shoot you and take your gold, but if they threaten to shoot you and you don't want to give them your bitcoin, your bitcoin goes to the grave with you.
If you want to dig in to this more, check out Greg Foss or Jesse Myers. They are both very knowledgeable but explain things in clear and simple terms.
