[solotronics]

I think there are literally hundreds of examples from the past century where huge swaths of the population lost all of their wealth due to political and economic turmoil. You are welcome to keep all of your funds in the hands of the central bankers if you believe in them, nobody will stop you. I will keep a portion of my money in my own hands in BTC where no corrupt politician or banker can get it.

[AlexMax]

Out of the hands of politicians and bankers and right into the hands of a script kiddie when the box that stores your wallet - be it locally or an exchange - gets hijacked and your wallet depleted. Or where nobody can get to it after you suffer catastrophic data-loss and you can't get to your wallet anymore.

If you want a hedge against a catastrophic collapse of the dollar (or whatever your local currency happens to be), there are innumerable other, better alternatives.

Besides, if there was such a collapse, who's to say that Bitcoin won't get dragged down with it? After all, more than likely you're using bitcoins to buy things that cost dollars.

[petertodd]

If I suffered a catastrophic data loss large that caused me to lose my BTC, I'd still be more concerned about the rest of my valuable data that I presumably lost too.

Bitcoin is far from the only case where catastrophic data losses or leaks are very costly. It's something that's certainely worth thinking about carefully, but it's not a fatal flaw for the system's usability - if it were all digital data use cases would be fatally flawed.

[solotronics]

I use a hardware wallet to store mine, analogy would be keeping your cash in a vault, yes you have to unlock it manually each time to get money out. Given the ease of use and recovery with a hardware wallet its the safest and most free store of value that I know of. Definitely a must have for amounts over a few hundred dollars. Its quite ingenious when you figure out how they work.

https://bitcointrezor.com/