A man comforts his daughter on the charred ruins of their family home burned in the Eaton Fire in … [+]
For generations, conventional wisdom has dictated that real estate is one of the safest and most reliable ways to store wealth. Unlike stocks, bonds, or cash, real estate is tangible—you can touch it, live in it, and pass it down to future generations. It is this physicality that has given real estate its status as a foundational asset class for wealth preservation.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has long been dismissed by traditional investors as the opposite. Critics say it has no physical presence, no utility, and no capacity to store value over the long term. They reason that, unlike real estate, you can’t touch bitcoin, you can’t live in it, and it’s hard to insure. It’s just code, they say. How can something so ephemeral be a store of value?
The answer, ironically, lies in that very same physicality—or rather, in the vulnerabilities of physical assets. As recent disasters in California and North Carolina have made painfully clear, the ability to touch an asset is not always an advantage. And in an era of increasing geopolitical instability, natural disasters, and shifting economic paradigms, bitcoin is proving to be the ultimate store of value precisely because of its unique form of physicality. That is, bitcoin is physical, just not in a way that makes it vulnerable to natural disasters.
The Fragility of Tangible Wealth
The catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles have left behind an apocalyptic landscape of destruction, reducing over 12,000 homes and buildings to ash. Families who had spent decades building wealth in their properties returned to find nothing but rubble and the haunting reality that their most valuable asset—their home—was gone.
In Western North Carolina, hurricanes have wiped entire towns off the map. Months later, many residents are still living in RVs, tents, or temporary shelters, unable to rebuild due to sky-high costs, insurance battles, or the simple fact that the land itself has become uninhabitable.
These disasters serve as brutal reminders of a fundamental truth: real estate does not have some kind of transcendent quality that makes it inherently low-risk. A home, no matter how valuable, is tied to a specific location. If that location is destroyed, occupied, or rendered unlivable, the asset may well become worthless. The wealth stored in that home can vanish in an instant, and rebuilding takes years—and even then, the rebuilding process could be subject to changes in the environment, legal and regulatory decisions, and other externalities.
For the people affected by these disasters, the idea that real estate is a perfectly safe way to store wealth is clearly untrue. Instead, they’re facing the reality that everything one has worked for can be erased – by natural disasters like fires and floods, or bureaucratic disasters like affordable housing requirements, “Coastal Commission” requirements, and endless red tape.
OLD FORT, NORTH CAROLINA – SEPTEMBER 30: A storm damaged car rests on a house in the aftermath of … [+]
Bitcoin: A New Kind of Property
Here’s where bitcoin shatters the old paradigm. Yes, bitcoin is physical—it exists in the real world–but its physicality is unlike that of real estate or gold. Instead of existing in a single place, subject to the forces of nature or politics, bitcoin exists in the form of identical data stored in the computer memory across hundreds of thousands of computers spread out all around the planet—and even in space.
Bitcoin’s ledger records property claims, and this ledger is immutable and perfectly replicated millions of times. You access your wealth using secret key that only you possess. You can store in multiple locations, encrypt digitally, or even memorize it. If properly secured, it is impossible to destroy, seize, or lose your property in any disaster that is not so great that it doesn’t also threaten the continuation of the human species.
Think about what this means: If a fire wipes out your home, your bitcoin remains untouched. If a hurricane devastates an entire town, your bitcoin holdings are exactly as they were before. If war breaks out and you’re forced to flee across a border, you don’t have to abandon your wealth and start over—you can take it with you simply by remembering a secret. Wherever you wind up, as long as you can eventually access the internet, you can access your money.
This is a concept that those who have lived through geopolitical crises understand intuitively. A person fleeing a war-torn country knows that their wealth, if tied up in a business or property, could be confiscated, bombed, or occupied by a new regime. In contrast, bitcoin offers an escape hatch—a way to retain financial sovereignty even when everything else is lost.
Americans, for the most part, have never had to think this way. Unlike citizens in nations plagued by war or oppressive governments, Americans have enjoyed relative stability for generations. But as wildfires, hurricanes, and even political unrest increase, the realization is beginning to set in: traditional wealth storage methods may not be as reliable as they once seemed.
In fact, the “stability” of the U.S. is itself more of a comfortable myth than a reality. Examining American history as a whole reveals that any given American has a 100% chance of living through civil unrest close to home. This is not to point out that the U.S. is particularly unstable—quite the opposite. The U.S. is perhaps the most stable political jurisdiction on planet Earth, and yet the reality of just how stable it is doesn’t match the comfortable stories we tell ourselves.
When you use the Bitcoin Network to store your wealth, you can access it from anywhere. It would … [+]
Preserving Wealth In An Uncertain World
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. Unlike gold, it cannot be confiscated at a border. Unlike fiat currency, it cannot be devalued by reckless government policies. It is, in every meaningful way, a fundamentally new form of property—one that is so robust that it is largely immune to the vulnerabilities of other assets.
And crucially, bitcoin does not require trust in institutions to protect it. In California, many homeowners are now fighting with insurance companies over payouts, discovering that their coverage is insufficient or, in some cases, nonexistent because insurers stopped writing new policies in high-risk areas. With bitcoin, there is no need to rely on an insurance company, a government, or a legal framework. It is a bearer asset. You have it, or you don’t. There needn’t be complex legal frameworks constructed around it just so that you may lay claim to your own property.
For years, investors scoffed at the idea that bitcoin could be a store of value. But as people in California and North Carolina 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.
