[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/