Some cryptocurrency isn't a safe store of value to begin with, so he was probably ready to lose that at any moment anyways. Worse way than most to lose it, but he doesn't sound too bummed out.
If I may, I would posit all crypto is not a safe store of value to begin with. An EMP taking out the entire world power grid would render crypto pretty useless almost immediately, while gold will just sit there. Even paper money is resistant to decentralized unwindings as they are physical and people are conditioned from birth to accept their value.
I think it doesn't do this as we have seen the value of gold shift so much over time.
If we look at Roman Empire during Augustus, your average denarius penny in the empire was worth about 10 hours of minimum wage. A denarius was about 1/10 of a troy ounce of silver, and you needed 25 of these to get an 8 gram gold coin, the aureus.
Going by today's standards, your typical 8 gram coin is worth $604.96 USD
If we go by the average minimum wage in the United states, 25 days at $72.5 USD/day for 10 hours of minimum wage, in order to compare to the Roman Empire during Augustus, pre-tax, the same coin was worth $1812.50 USD.
So to briefly summarize:
1 denarius penny = 1/10oz Silver = 10hrs minimum wage, 4 hours minimum wage today nets 10 times the Silver it did 2000 years ago. You can quickly see that if anything, on the basis of Silver alone, that our currency is worth about 23.7 times more than the currency of Rome ever was if we ignore taxes.
3-5% tax rate on total wealth was murder and why riots happened to begin with.
Then we look at the cost of a average small villa in that time period- 200,000 denarii.
You figure this means 200,000 days for your average agricultural worker at 1 denarii/day, but actually it's way more than that because there's the 3-5% wealth tax on them, plus the tax collector wages came from whatever they could extort on top of that.
200,000/365 = 548 years of payments only to a house at 1 denarii/day.
200,000/30 years= 6666.66 denarii/year
6666.66/270 (because I'm nice and assume we get days off in this time period (today)) = 24.69 denarii/day, or about 98.8% of an aureus per day, would be required to own a small villa on a 30 year mortgage during the Emperor Augustus roman empire, (excluding the extreme 3-5% annual total wealth tax).
I figure most people here would agree that even at minimum wage, a personal villa is much more accessible today. Even a $1,000,000 home on minimum wage with zero other expenses or taxes, working 10 hour days, 5 days a week, would basically pay it off on a 51 year mortgage at 1631.25/month.
I think that's why so many people here feel ripped off. Homes would be much more affordable if the loan terms were slightly longer, but there's a bunch of old people out there trying to min/max their investment based income before they die.
I don't see anything wrong with them wanting to do that, but I think it would be wise if consumers began to push for longer mortgages because as a function over time, while the dollar is still worth quite a bit, it is nonetheless losing value. Keeping your mortgage going means the bank gets less value out of the loan over time, assuming inflation remains static.
I know you didn't expect this reply but I enjoyed learning and making it. If you end up going back over it and have any corrections you'd like to make I'm all ears, but I'd agree. Crypto is a crappy place to have a store of value right now and arguably you'd be a fool to not have it invested in the stock market targeted index fund because that's simply how the world of finance works today.
It's not about what we can do in a day, it's about how we can leverage the income to get more done in a day, even if it's not being done by us directly. That's why investing in the stock market, in stocks you trust as a consumer, is so important to the success of capitalism long term.
Gold is a great form of money thanks to its unique chemistry:
Its colour and lustre is unique - it's fairly easy to tell something is gold-ish by eye and weight. This is why gold was chosen by our low-tech forebears.
Its lower melting temp makes it easier to purify than say Platinum or even Aluminium.
Its inertness (thanks in part to the relativistic contraction of the 6s orbitals) mean that you can leave it in a safe for 1000 years and it'll basically be the same. You literally need conc HNO3 and H2SO4 aka aqua Regis to dissolve it.
People who think gold is a pet rock and is useless fail to appreciate that even if all stores of value are pointless and arbitrary, we still gravitate around particular stores for a reason.
I'd be fairly happy to hang onto some gold in a post Apocalyptic world if it looks like society may eventually recover.
Even stuff like coffee and oil would be useless in any size because they have a shelf life. And cash at scale can literally rot or get eaten by mice. Gold can be buried and it'll be there forever basically
It is in fact not a given(I for one do not trust the value of bitcoin or other cryptos, and I know more people who don't believe crypto has any value than those who do), and your comment is an example of attempting to coerce public opinions and beliefs in such a way as to promote crypto.
Oh, and please don't try to argue about the value of gold coming from its physical properties
I understand why you would want to discount from the conversation the very things that make gold valuable; but I don't have to let you move the goalposts. Gold has properties of corrosion resistance (store of value), rarity, and desirable qualities(such as its color and weight, using it in jewelery to attract mates) which allows it to be a medium of exchange, and the fact that it is easily separated from other metals by its low melting point, not to mention its luster is different from other base metals used for currency, makes it easy to use it as a unit of accord for payment of taxes and such. These properties are unmatched by other more common, natural materials-- that humans have long recognized it as unique and rare on Earth merely raises its intrinsic value to human society. Ya can't eat gold as a person, after all.
(lest you think me a gold bug, I don't have any gold and actively recommend that humans not possess it except where they actually need the properties in question. I do the same for fiat currency too. They're all just tools for getting by in life)
And most of the gold owned in the world is not in someone's basement, but as a line in a database; so you can wave goodbye to that as well.