By GregWilson
had $1 million in gold hidden in a safe on your property. The Feds are en route to your home. And they plan to confiscate whatever they find of value. Could you sew all that gold into your clothes... like the Jewish children fleeing Nazi repression did? That’s just not practical... Remember the crook who stole a bucket of gold flakes from an unlocked armored truck in New York? The bucket was worth $1.6 million. It weighed 86 pounds. Try lugging that around with you. What if you had $1 million in the bank? You could convert that to cash, right? Well, not so fast... If you stuffed $1 million in $20 bills into a garbage bag, it’d weigh 110 pounds. That’s more than the bucket of gold flakes. And good luck trying to withdraw $1 million from a bank without getting noticed. If you tried to take out just $10,000, the bank would immediately alert the Feds. There are other options out there... You could convert your life savings into art, stamps, vintage cars, fine wines, or precious jewels like diamonds. But they each have high risks: They can be damaged, stolen, or lost. Some of these assets aren’t portable. And others aren’t liquefiable... meaning you couldn’t readily find buyers for them or carry them around easily. (Try hawking a rare Norman Rockwell painting without an auction house. It won’t be easy.)
HOWTO ‘TELEPORT’ YOUR LIFE SAVINGS If I needed to flee quickly and take my life savings with me, I’d use bitcoin... Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are nothing more than digital money. You can store them on your computer or mobile device. Another way is to hold your cryptocurrencies offline in “cold storage.” (Cold storage is when you put a cryptocurrency in a wallet. The safest type is a paper wallet. You can print out your private key and password and store it in a safety deposit box. Or you can put the information on a thumb drive and put that in a secure place.) Cryptocurrencies are also stored anonymously on the blockchain. So it’s difficult for someone to hack into your online account or confiscate your money. With bitcoin, you can move $1 million just as easily as you could move $1. With one click of a mouse, you can send your life savings anywhere in the world... securely, anonymously, and almost instantaneously. It’s like having your own gold transporter... If it’s in cold storage, you could upload $1 million to your thumb drive. It’s like carrying $1 million in a device the size of a cigarette lighter. No other asset offers the combination of portability, liquidity, security, and anonymity that it does. It’s the perfect “chaos hedge.”
American Consequences | 51
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