If you're to the point where some authority is forcefully taking your assets away, I'd much rather have physical possession of gold than Bitcoin. You can bury gold somewhere and pretend you don't have it. Bitcoin, on the other hand, takes place on a public ledger, so they can, in theory, always track it down. And a thug who's willing to take your gold at gunpoint will be equally happy to take your wallet keys at gunpoint.
In terms of @#*%ing up the economy, governments are just as able to trash the Bitcoin economy as they were to trash the gold economy 100 years ago. Using exactly the same methods, too.
The buried gold is hard to access, not portable, and you would have to be damn sure some hobo didn't see you bury it.
1. Don't use brain wallets, unless you really understand security
If you are spending a week in a cold dirty room etc., and especially if some gov got you there, I don't think it matters much how guilty you are or what wealth do you have. They own you.
But if it helps you, think about some other government, not necessarily the US one. Do you think they all do the right thing? Should you or should you not be able to help your starving family in Venezuela?
They really can't all be doing "the right thing" because they have wars between each other. And those are legal in their books. But you probably want to play along however imperfect rules your government sets, that is until you want to escape the country and you don't want it to be your government anymore. Because e.g. you don't feel like killing every Jew you know and that just became the law.
If the US Government, tomorrow, declares a 100% tax on Bitcoin, they can legally posess all of your BTC or... make you a criminal.
See Executive Order 6102 for historical precedent. FDR declared Gold to be illegal and took it from most Americans. At which point, you either gave up your gold, or became a gold smuggler. The US functioned as such until Nixon removed the executive order.
> To date, agents have seized over $200,000 in cash and $25,000 in Bitcoins from Defendant’s operation.
> …It is critical to note, however, that this figure represents a small fraction of the proceeds that were flowing to Defendant. The cash seized came only from funds that Defendant had on hand on May 28, 2014, and from an earlier limited seizure of packages. As discussed above, Defendant’s operation was high-volume and lucrative, and agents do not know where Defendant has hidden the rest of the money.
> While agents made a limited seizure of only $25,000 in Bitcoins from Defendant, it is possible that he has access to significantly greater quantities of this currency.
https://www.deepdotweb.com/2018/01/11/darknet-vendor-dutchki...
> The ex-boyfriend may have earned even more money, but he told the court that he had forgotten the passwords needed to access one of his laptops.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/manchester-s...
> The value of their sales was at least £812,000, the court heard, but their profits are likely to have grown exponentially due to the rise in the value of bitcoin over the period. Prosecutors have so far been unable to trace Assaf’s bitcoin.
There are hundreds of other cases in which they didn't seize 100% of the suspect's BTC.
The cases in which they do seize 100% get more media attention, but they are actually in the minority.
Plus buying stuff online is more tricky.
I could envision alternative reality though, where there are companies specializing in providing tokens that have 100% coverage in gold. You would need to trust them and their software, but some trust is always involved. The problem is those would be an easy target with physical holdings (so the problem of the gov comes back, but they could choose under which gov to operate). In that scenario, if the problem gets big enough the gov will take care of it, no matter where on the planet is that gold. In the case of Bitcoin though, while temporarily it can be hampered very easily, it's quite impossible to make it completely go away.
The biggest point for gold IMO which you didn't mention, since all value comes from people and their beliefs, is thousands of years vs 10 years.