A friend asked; I have a serious question for you (no snark): How will those who have invested in cryptos or in metals have assurance that their money is safe and can be withdrawn at will?
Here is my response; First of all, only gold and silver are 'money'. Look up the definition. How will you know If your 'currency' (current-sea, as in the current sea of medium of exchange/unit of account) is safe and redeemable; There will always be people willing to give you paper, plastic, or digital bank notes for a hard asset like gold/silver. I am a follower of Austrian economics. The true 'money' is gold and silver. You will always be able to trade it in for government issued bank notes, as there are always buyers.
Gold and silver have been used as money for thousands of years and have NEVER gone to zero. Government issued currencies have ALWAYS reverted to their intrinsic value of zero. Fiat (government bank notes not backed by anything) is a relatively new experiment. The only way the government convinced the people to take their worthless paper in exchange for the true wealth (gold/silver) was by issuing a 'promissory note' that was fully redeemable in gold. They slowly decreased the amount of gold backing those dollars to fund WW1 and WW2 (wealth theft and the start of inflation). And in 1971, Nixon unpegged the currency to gold, which allowed the central banks to create as much currency as they wanted out of thin air (the start of the massive devaluation).
So I personally choose to hold wealth in an asset that can not be easily counterfeit. Any time a currency has become easy to counterfeit, it has lost all value/utility. And that is what is happening with fiat currencies. The USD has lost 98% of its value since its inception. Physical gold is hard to produce and tricky to counterfeit. Therefor it will retain value long after the government currencies fail.
As for crypto; it is a very new experiment and I would not recommend investing any currency you can't afford to lose. However, something like bitcoin is IMPOSSIBLE to counterfeit and is even harder to create than gold. This gives it some fantastic properties (to name only a few) that make it a great unit of account. What makes a currency a good unit of account/store of value is using something that is very hard to create and impossible to counterfeit ( HARD MONEY ). Bitcoin is exactly this. That is why it has MASSIVE potential as a new form of money.
You will only be able to redeem government issued currency if their are buyers; however, when governments are creating billions of fiat everyday out of thin air, and there is an ever-increasing scarcity of bitcoin; I believe it has a lot of potential to retain value in the long term. Government issued bank notes, not so much.
I would ask; How do you know your wealth is safe in government currencies when they are being counterfeit every day? They are becoming worthless as they are being created out of thin air with absolutely NO cost or difficulty of production. How do you know there will always be someone who will take you pieces of plastic, paper, or digital numbers in exchange for tangible assets?
Curious CAT