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or generations, real estate has been considered a safe and reliable way to store wealth. Its physicality made it a foundational asset class for wealth preservation. However, recent disasters in California and North Carolina have shown that this conventional wisdom is flawed. The ability to touch an asset is not always an advantage.
The catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles left over 12,000 homes and buildings in ruins, reducing families' most valuable assets to ash. Hurricanes in Western North Carolina wiped entire towns off the map, leaving residents without homes or access to basic necessities. These disasters serve as brutal reminders that real estate does not have a transcendent quality that makes it inherently low-risk.
A home's value is tied to its location, and if that location is destroyed or rendered unlivable, the asset may become worthless. The wealth stored in a home can vanish instantly, and rebuilding takes years, subject to changes in the environment, regulations, and other externalities. For those affected by these disasters, the idea that real estate is a perfectly safe way to store wealth is clearly untrue.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has proven to be the ultimate store of value precisely because of its unique form of physicality. It exists as identical data stored in computer memory across hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and even in space. Bitcoin's ledger records property claims, and this ledger is immutable and perfectly replicated millions of times.
You can access your wealth using a secret key that only you possess, store it in multiple locations, encrypt digitally, or memorize it. If properly secured, it is impossible to destroy, seize, or lose your property in any disaster short of a planet-wide catastrophe. This means that if a fire wipes out your home, your bitcoin remains untouched.
Bitcoin offers an escape hatch—a way to retain financial sovereignty even when everything else is lost. Unlike citizens in war-torn countries, Americans have enjoyed relative stability for generations, but as wildfires, hurricanes, and political unrest increase, the realization is setting in: traditional wealth storage methods may not be as reliable as they once seemed.
The "stability" of the U.S. is itself a comfortable myth rather than a reality. Examining American history reveals that any given American has a 100% chance of living through civil unrest close to home. When you use the Bitcoin Network to store your wealth, you can access it from anywhere, and it would take a planet-wide catastrophe to destroy it.
Bitcoin's advantage is not just that it is portable but that it is incorruptible. Unlike real estate, bitcoin is not subject to eminent domain, zoning laws, or environmental disasters. It does not require trust in institutions to protect it, making it a fundamentally new form of property—one that is robust and largely immune to the vulnerabilities of other assets.
For years, investors scoffed at the idea that bitcoin could be a store of value. But as people begin rebuilding their lives, many are coming to a sobering conclusion: owning something you can touch doesn't mean it will always be there. Ironically, owning something that you can't touch means it could have better chances of survival.
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