I've kept my money at a major bank since I was a teenager and they were never shut down by the government, and their database never lost my account information. I guess I trust it.
I'd argue that their value has diminished, akin to a scenario where some of them are lost, much like a bank losing a portion of its deposits.
Can you cite a recent (viz. the last 20 years) example of where an American bank lost somebody's money? I simply haven't ever heard of such a thing.
Of course even if there were sparse issues, you'd have to compare that to the relative safety of people keeping their wealth on their own person. I can
absolutely give you
thousands of examples of people losing their cash, commodities, crypto, and everything else through theft, misplacement, and so on.
On a theoretical level, absolutely no store of wealth is "absolutely safe", and there's some identifiable risk no matter what you do.
But keeping your money in a typical American bank (just keeping this domestic as an example) is, statistically speaking, thousands of times safer than the alternatives.
And again--I'm a broken record on this--but
almost all holders of Bitcoin do so through a broker or an app. Most consumers don't want to hold their major assets (as opposed to minor cash) in their own person.
You haven't persuaded me yet about the potential outcome if your government mandates KYC collection or imposes closure, a scenario highly likely in today's world.
Well, we are in the exact same boat as Ether and all of the other non-decentralized cryptos, and in the same boat as the identifiable Bitcoin mining companies (e.g. almost all of them). I guess some governments could come after all of us, but they are thus far focusing on the brokerage endpoints, which is very effective and gives them everything they need. There's simply no reason for them to shut down the transfer mechanism insofar as they can get at the graph in the middle, which they can.
I mean, sure, "anything is possible", but the focus on mixers tells me that they are only worried about the transfer graph being hidden from them because with that they can figure out the rest. And again, for Haypenny currencies, the graph is not hidden from governments with valid subpoenas, but only hidden from criminals and marketers and the public.