...or by the family, or by their investments, or by charity.
Family and charity may be unreliable. Investments are probably OK but if investments are not a good choice, should you not be able to hold your money in currency and not have it robbed by inflation bandits?
No you should not be able to. You should either save it (let the bank invest it), or invest it yourself in a very diversified portfolio. If you hide it under the mattress or in gold silver or bitcoins, you deserve to lose it since you're basically making a bet that society is gonna fail, yet too dumb to realize all these items will also be worthless in that case.
Having a very small portion of your net worth in bitcoins or precious metals is reasonable, as long as you're prepared to lose it all. Anyone who bought-to-hold or sold bitcoin in the last 4 months has done nothing to contribute to the future of bitcoin, sorry but its true.