The median person does not have $10k sitting in a checking account that they can easily withdraw. My gut feeling is that the threat of kidnapping is a lot more serious in some countries. The US maybe not so much.

> The median person does not have $10k sitting in a checking account that they can easily withdraw.

That's true, finding someone with 10k is not as easy as picking a person at random, but it is as easy as driving to the right parking lot and picking a person at random.

Pulling $10k out of the global banking system by physical coercion in a way that isn't reversible and won't get you caught is hard problem, you might as well attempt to rob the bank instead. That's why most of the "successful" criminals in that space use social engineering and scamming where the victim is a unwitting participant rather than kidnapping someone.

With crypto, no bank or other middleman involved, it's like stealing physical cash/gold/diamonds from someone, if you know they have it in their possession, so violence can be a lot more successful at coercing a change of possession.

Good point, perhaps the lower $ examples are about other countries where that may be a lot more than median transactional account holdings and maybe that concern is part of why folks were using crypto holdings.

Yeah, but banks and the normie monetary system has a lot more safeguards in it when it comes to account transfers. Or at least, they appear to have them.

Crypto? It's wild, and people think it's wild.

of course, you need to point out that Crypto has ended up being indistinguishable from the banking system in all the important parts.

The distinguishing parts are things you don't want: easily corrupted, grifted, cheated and otherwise duped.

I tried to use Coinbase a few months ago to pay for something, and I couldn't even make a transaction because it was deemed suspicious, and my account got locked or something.

Someone with a lot of cryptocurrency in Coinbase is also quite likely (at least relative to the average person) to have lots of on-chain cryptocurrency, too, though.

The average American can't deal with a $1000 emergency.

Maybe they wouldn't be able to cover other planned expenses with said loss or something but the median (I intentionally avoid referring to "average" for reasons also mentioned in this article) amount American have access to in their transactional bank accounts is $8,000 according to the Federal Reserve: https://www.fool.com/money/research/average-savings-account-...

Someone else made a great mention though: Coinbase didn't just serve the US. For the vast majority of countries these amounts are more than the yearly disposable income of a typical household. From that angle the numbers in the stories make a bit more sense.

Bank transactions are reversible, crypto transactions are not.

Also, people do point guns in people’s faces and force them to pay them via Venmo or Cashapp. Google ‘Venmo robbery’ or ‘cashapp robbery’ for plenty of examples. Pointing a gun in someone’s face for $4M in crypto is a lot more lucrative.