Underground Bitcoin bunkers are the ultimate cold storage solution

If you're not storing your Bitcoin in underground military bunkers, then you're doing it all wrong. That's the big takeaway from a somewhat sensationalistic piece from Bloomberg claiming that The Wealthy Are Hoarding $10 Billion of Bitcoin in Bunkers. The security measures at these underground bunkers are pretty impressive by any standard -- there are guards, blast doors, reinforced concrete and... fingerprint scanners so technologically sophisticated that they "prevent amputated hands from being used." (I'm not making this up)

I get it - Bitcoin may be encrypted, but if anyone ever gets access to your cryptographic keys, it's gone forever. So cold storage makes sense. That's why people buy those $99 Ledger Nanos on Amazon.com.

Is this Bitcoin bunker story just a PR hoax?

However, there are so many elements of this Bloomberg story that just don't make any sense to me...

First of all, why is the guy ( Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares) who is offering these super-sophisticated (and super-expensive) storage services also the guy who is known as the biggest Bitcoin evangelist around? Bloomberg calls this guy "Patient Zero" for infecting others with the Bitcoin virus. In other words, the same guy who is telling you that you absolutely must invest in Bitcoin also happens to offer the perfect way to store it. Convenient.

And why the need for massive, military-style bunkers if all you're storing is a cryptographic key? With cryptocurrencises, there's nothing "physical" to store, right? And yet the article makes it sound like wealthy members of the Silicon Valley elite are flying to Switzerland on a regular basis to make regular withdrawals and deposits from these bunkers, just as if it were a Swiss bank and they were depositing gold bars.

And, finally, the $10 billion figure sounds a bit over-inflated. Right now on CoinMarketCap.com, the total market capitalization of Bitcoin is $158 billion. So you're telling me that 6% of the world's Bitcoin supply is buried underground in a Swiss military-style bunker? I guess that's the ultimate buy and HODL strategy.

My hot take is that the traditional world of banking and finance is doing everything possible to co-opt the crypto movement. They want you to trade cryptos on exchanges that they run and invest in cryptos they create. And now they want you to safeguard your cryptos in underground Swiss military bunkers that they run...

Hollywood needs a Bitcoin heist movie

Anyway, I'm waiting for the first great Bitcoin heist movie - sort of an "Ocean's 11" for the Bitcoin generation:

A smash and grab job? Slightly more complicated than that...

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CREDITS:

Bank vault image by Jonathunder - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

Ben Franklin Illuminati eye photo by Vladislav Reshetnyak via Pexels