There’s a scene in the Game of Thrones where a man called The Hound finds out where an old farmer has hidden his silver. The Hound promptly robs him. There was, of course, no way to call the police. The state was not there to defend the old man’s property. This was a fairly typical problem in ancient and medieval times.

In modern times if Mr Jones kept a bag of gold on his kitchen table, few would try to steal it because most peeps would be deterred by the threat of incarceration. Jones can call the cops. The state sometimes fails, but it sincerely tries to protect Jones’ property rights. But even this low level of risk is too much for most people. Mr Smith prefers to keep his money in the bank. The state insures his deposits there. Official channels allow him to access his monetary assets, and he has legal recourse if there is any dispute.

The BitCoin ideology however says that the state should have no role in the financial system. So BitCoiners take their money out of legally existing institutions. They might put their virtual cash on an exchange, the crypto equivalent of a bank, but those have been collapsing as their founders simply stole the money.

So crypto enthusiasts are left trying to figure out how to keep their valuables (which are really just long chains of letters and numbers stored on a computer) safe in their own homes. It’s a return to ancient times where everyone has to fend for themselves. Today it’s not likely to be a nasty barbarian with a battle ax, but the chances hackers will try to get your crypto wealth thru digital trickery are very high.

If you want to spend the rest of your life trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers who would love to steal the virtual bag of cyber-gold you keep in your living room, go ahead and convert your assets to BitCoin. The vast majority of the population will not join you on your journey back to the medieval stateless Wild West of crypto-finance.