> You can't print gold

You can 10x the world gold supply by capturing a single medium-sized metallic asteroid.

You also can't send gold over the internet or store it in a private key. Given that Bitcoin is otherwise quite similar, mutatis mutandis, it's not unreasonable to imagine that Bitcoin might displace gold to some degree as a reserve asset.

People also lose bitcoins, I assume easier than losing physical currency or a bank account.

One of the ways I don't feel bad about not making millions in BTC even though I was aware of it long ago is the absolute certainty that I would have simply lost the paper wallet, had a hard-drive failure, etc, etc. There is just no way I would have held onto my keys for the 7 years that I was aware of it. I imagine that the breakage here for early investors is probably pretty high. I never did cash out on my dogecoin...

It’s not impossible to make copies of and secure private keys if you have a plan. (But even if you had bought some and preserved it, would you have had the tenacity/foresight to hold onto the BTC for 7+ years?)

> It’s not impossible to make copies of and secure private keys if you have a plan

I was 100% discussing my scenario. I would absolutely not have enacted a careful plan with multiple fall-backs. Which is it's own kind of self-indictment tbh, but one that I am at peace with. :D

Also, this holds for 99.99% of the populous. Even hardware wallets aren't a great solution and there you're paying a hundred dollars or so just to get one.

Shovels in a gold rush.