Whether or not you actually think this is a good thing to plan for now or not, you owe it to yourself to have an understanding of what Bitcoin can offer you in a collapse scenario. You should probably also know about Monero. It can even work with widespread internet outages, we’ll get to that in a moment. My goal is to give you the information you need to decide if this is something worth looking into further. I will gladly answer any questions you may have.

Why?

• Global instability and partial breakdown of intl markets or national or supranational governance structures will greatly impact the spending power of your national currency, even if you are blessed with a fairly stable one right now
• Your government, in an attempt to stop the bleeding, will eventually resort to just printing more currency because that’s one of the last measures that every failed state since the invention of currency has pursued, including both sides of the US during the civil war (though the north was a little better at backing that printing with additional investments/securities but that’s a story for another time). It’s also a measure they use in less dire circumstances, like bank bailouts and “quantitative easing”.
• Your government may also go around seizing assets randomly, in an attempt to keep their system afloat, like the US did when it went around seizing everybody’s gold to maintain the gold standard

During this time period, it would be wise for you to:

• Keep a hold of as many assets as you can
• Have something to exchange for goods or services. Even if international supply chains have broke down, you will still want to trade with people locally and maybe occasionally far away

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Bitcoin and Monero, let’s start with some basics about Bitcoin:

• Bitcoin is a digital currency that is minted according to a protocol. The protocol sets the rules for how and when coins can be minted. This protocol is secured via cryptography.
• Bitcoin has faithfully followed this protocol for 15 years. Every day, 24/7, 365 days a year without getting hacked or experiencing a single hour of downtime.
• With Bitcoin lightning, international transactions take less than a second, for fees 100-1000% lower than credit cards, paypal, etc often under a single cent. Even on main chain, fees are much lower than wire costs and whatever your probably less than trustworthy post-collapse money broker is charging you.
• Anybody can access and use Bitcoin who has a phone and internet access. The setup process takes less than 5 minutes. There’s no ID required, no bank holidays, and no middlemen.
• Bitcoin, unlike some national governments now, and certainly your national government in a time of crisis, has a clear, unchanging economic policy. There are a certain number of Bitcoin’s minted, and after that no more can be minted. That’s the policy.
• Because Bitcoin is decentralized, so secure, and based on basic principles of physics and math instead of trusting some particular party like a central bank, nobody can make Bitcoin print money it’s not supposed to or do anything it’s not supposed to. The government can’t turn on the money printer and dilute the value of your Bitcoin by making more of them. The system isn’t kept together and working through altruism, it’s kept together and working due to principles of mathematics and physics that simply being rich or powerful doesn’t absolve you of following unlike much of our legal system.
• In order to spend your Bitcoins you have to have access to a “private key” which is really just a very long number. If you don’t have the private key, you can’t spend the Bitcoins. Nobody can guess your private key, because guessing them even using all of the globe’s current computing power would take approximately until the heat death of the universe.
• Because the “private key” is just a small piece of information, it is easy to hide. You can write it on a piece of paper, memorize it, or put it on a flash drive. You can also split the key among multiple parties so that even if one of you gets kidnapped, they can’t spend funds without the approval of the other people in your group. Cash and gold can’t do that.

Bitcoin vs precious metals:

• Bitcoin is much, much easier to spend than gold or silver.
• Gold requires you to figure out how to slice off a small amount of it to spend it, which is awkward
• Gold requires you to move it from buyer to seller physically or trust some third party to attest that the gold has transferred via using gold as a paper security
• Gold takes up physical space and hiding it is harder. Even burying it in your yard can be undone by a cheap metal detector. Good luck getting it through a border crossing.
• Large gold transactions require enlisting a third party to verify the gold is actually gold, or the equipment and knowledge to do it yourself.
• Yes, gold has industrial uses, but we have way more gold than we need for those industrial uses. And there will be a lot less industrial uses when… global industry collapses. Its use as a currency was great in the 1300s, but now we have much better systems that it can’t really compete with.

Ok ok, so what about if there are widespread internet outages?

• Your bank is useful because it’s connected to other banks. During widespread internet, power, and other infrastructure issues, it becomes a lot less functional for moving money from A to B.
• As long as you have one connection to the internet, you can access and spend your Bitcoin. If you have no connection, your Bitcoin stays safe on the blockchain waiting for you to come back. And if your recipient has no internet access at the moment? Same thing.
• Even without internet, you can sign transactions and use lightning channels, which you can use as a basis for some localized trading with some trust trade-offs. There are, in fact, some Bitcoin wallets that are optimized for low-connectivity situations.
• While Comcast may not have survived, internet will be one of the first infrastructures people setup and share. It takes surprisingly little power to run and exists as a mesh network. There will be lots of equipment left over to run basic internet services for the globe for a while. I am glossing over some details here, but safe to say collapse != no internet forever. Things will be rocky for a bit, but we will likely have working wifi before we have running water or stable government again, for many reasons. Plus satellites exist.
• While there are many caveats and interesting scenarios to explore here (like what if the internet splits into two seperate internets?), in pretty much all of them Bitcoin still maintains a decent degree of usability and security.

Ok, so that’s Bitcoin, but what about Monero? Monero is another cryptocurrency, similar to Bitcoin, but with a focus on privacy. This is important.

• Every transaction on the Bitcoin ledger is public. Everybody can see who sends coins from A to B
• The identity behind a Bitcoin address is pseudonymous. This means that if you make a new wallet, nobody knows who is behind “wallet B”.
• But there are ways to find out who owns “wallet B”. For example, if somebody asks you to send them some coins, now you have a wallet address and a name to match up. They might have also bought coins on an exchange, so now the government and exchange know who that address belongs to, etc.
• The public nature of the Bitcoin ledger also means that anybody can see the balance of any address. This could single you out as a target for robbery.
• Monero solves these problems by using a changed version of the Bitcoin protocol. Nobody can know your balance and nobody can see the flow of money from A to B, so you can maintain your anonymity.
• The monero network has been around since 2014 and is considered a fairly reliable coin. It has less hashpower behind it (less security), but is still plenty secure for most any transaction you can imagine.

Now, here are some common reasons why people say Bitcoin would be useless to them. For any criticism you can think of, ask “why isn’t this true of fiat” and you’ll find it probably equally applies.

• “Bitcoin has no inherent value” - K, then give me some please? Neither does fiat currency. In fact, by design, fiat’s value decreases over time. The primary value of any currency is the stability of its fiscal policy and the network effect ie how many places can you buy and spend it. Bitcoin has the biggest network effect of any cryptocurrency. Year after year, on average, adoption grows no matter how you measure it (liquidity, number of nodes, etc). Bitcoins value is that it has an incredibly clear, stable fiscal policy and usability as a transactional currency. That’s it.
• “In a collapse scenario, nobody wants Bitcoin, they’ll want bread or other resources” - Sure, barter will always have its place, especially early on, but what is more valuable than a single item is a currency you can trade for many items. You may want stuff I have but have no things I want. Currency solves that problem. In other collapse scenarios even with incredibly unreliable currency and hyperinflation we still see people using currency for buying items. Currency’s utility doesn’t disappear just because a currency sucks.
• “Bitcoin uses too much energy” - Bitcoin uses less than 1% of global energy, much of it from renewables. Energy usage is crucial to securing the blockchain. Think about just how much energy is used by all the western union locations in the world, all the other wire transfer facilities which exist to do exactly what Bitcoin does but with more efficiency and delays. Bitcoin miners tend to chase the cheapest electricity, which often is from renewables, “stranded energy”, and over-provisioned grids. Bitcoin has even been used to increase production of renewables due to its ability to even out energy demand curves. See this article for more details. Many currencies are based on incredibly inequitably distributed resources like precious metals or stable governments. Bitcoin is based on energy, which while not perfectly equitably distributed, is the most equitably distributed resource in the world. It literally falls from the sky onto every square meter of earth.

An important warning: there are two ways you can “own” Bitcoin: self-custody and everything else.

• Self-custody means you have the private key to your Bitcoin.
• A “custodial” wallet means somebody else has the private key to your Bitcoin. You’ve deposited it in their private little bank and they promise to give it back. Bitcoin exchanges work this same way. If they collapse, you lose your funds. Custodial wallets are fine to use and come with some benefits, just don’t store anything in them you’d be sad to lose. Move funds you actually care about into your self-custody wallet.
• A self-custody wallet requires you to be dilligent about backups. If your computer or phone dies and you lose your private key/seed phrase, you can’t get the Bitcoin back. Period. No matter how much you fuss and how much money you spend. Seriously. The same technology that protects you from other people spending your Bitcoin also means you can’t spend it if you lose your key.
• Bitcoin lightning is great for everyday spending. If you have larger sums of money, move that BTC “on-chain” and out of lightning.
• When researching wallets, make sure you know what kind of custody the wallet offers. Always choose open-source wallets which are well reviewed online for maximum security. If you are storing large amounts of funds, look into things like multi-sig wallets, cold storage, etc.