I'm still not sure what that means. Can you give me an example where I "don't" have total control over my savings held in various stocks and ETFs in my brokerage account, but I "do" have "total control" over Bitcoin in my brokerage account? A tangible example?
You can hold Bitcoin without a brokerage account, with a brokerage account it indeed becomes pointless when you consider this advantage (no intermediary) only.
But even with self-custody, you still need to trade it somehow in order to use it for your own life. And self-custody has it's own problems, and one can easily "lose control" if your physical keys are lost or stolen.
Okay, but how exactly would Bitcoin help you there? In order to gain any benefit you'd need to take your entire life off-grid.
No. If they detect you're an opposition supporter, they could for example order your bank to freeze your account. Just to scare you, because killing all opposition supporters is not rational for them. Dictatorships have used these "scare" tactics for decades if not centuries. The only dictator that tried to kill
all oppositionals was Pol Pot if I'm not incorrect (and North Korea is at least imprisoning a lot of them, but that's also an extreme example).
Your Bitcoin account is unaffected. They can't take it away if you're careful. And if you are cut from the Internet and mobile provider too, then you can still use local open WLANs or, in big cities, often mesh networks.
So you live in a shack in the middle of the forest and without electricity or any other connection to the outside world in order to evade prosecution, but... you've got some private keys stored on your
computer little pieces of paper, and you have "total control of your money"? Sounds like no control of anything, let alone your money.
If your government is after you, where you store your savings is the least of your worries...
High Bitcoin ownership can also help to pressure a government which is moving into an authoritarian direction.
How? Again, governments can control anything they want. Bitcoin is
on the internet and as such is trivial to track, especially when it's converted to something tangible in order to be spent.
If a high percentage of the population has Bitcoin, the scare tactics of such a government become less ineffective. And then they may become more willing to move into a "benevolent" direction.
99.9% of people do not want to be criminals, and wouldn't be good criminals even if they wanted to be. If your government has gone bad, there's nothing you can do--your choices are either comply or live with a drastically reduced quality of life e.g. living off-grid (or living partially off-grid, etc.).
By talking about a US government that has "gone rogue", you are talking about a doomsday scenario that would mean a useless or inaccessible Internet and the fall of the financial system that would drive Bitcoin's price to 2010 levels at best.
If they outlawed Bitcoin, for instance, the value would drop by 99% or more.
Most governments do not have that power. Again, not even China was capable of a catastrophic crash, and China is clearly the #2 of the world and may soon be #1 just by its population weight.
China never had any power over Bitcoin because it did not host the financial system responsible for 99% of its tradable value.
L2's are not Bitcoin. They are L2s. They introduce risk and friction that basically makes it pointless to have the first layer.
That's a bit of a shallow and black-and-white answer. I've already written that the most risk in Ark is that you lose access for some days (depending on the configuration). They can't steal your money (like other L2s like Liquid in theory could).
Sure they can. If your transaction is going through the system, the transaction can be stolen or lost. You are adding a layer of software that can do whatever it wants to do with your Bitcoin.
And meanwhile, there are L1 systems that work way better, and are thoroughly trusted with $trillions in transactions.
In security, any system is only as strong as its weakest link.
But the scenario with a pro-government fork you outlined would crash both the government fork and the real Bitcoin, and that's why Coinbase y Cia. would never move in that direction.
I agree that it's unlikely, and there's no evidence anybody is planning anything like this, but the point of the OP is that it's not "impossible". The fact is that the financial system that powers everybody's bags and buys people's houses and cars and fancy dinners is controlled by the US and other major governments. The only way out of this is voting (and hoping), not some code checked in to Github.
And if you really are preparing for doomsday, buy bullets and other things that are tradable without, say, your iPhone connected to T-Mobile since all of those things aren't going to be around when society crumbles.
With a Gun does it really change much?
Your life is already in danger
It's easier for people to know how much you own in a bank than in Bitcoin
Except well you stupid to announce it
So to me this doesn't hold much water.
Robbing a bank is a lot harder than robbing a person. And the bank is likely insured. Etc. Most people let others take the risk of violence and pay them a small fee for their trouble.
And the minute you try to spend your BTC you reveal that you have it--and you reveal to petty criminals that they can get your money very easily.
This is why 99% of people use banks etc. to hold their money...
