If everything else fails, I know I can still have two things to pay with: cash and crypto.
Good luck buying groceries or paying the mortgage with Crypto.
Bitcoin doesn't store any energy.
Bitcoin is like a F1 car going around a track forever, with your name scribbled on it.
(You conveniently left out “cash” from your reply. Cash. I’ll buy groceries with cash, if I can’t use my card.)
I think of them as representations of the idea that energy is (currently) so abundant and cheap that we can waste it on mining things like gold and crypto, a fundamentally ridiculous concept in terms of real actual human needs.
Once that stops being the case (when fossil fuel starts running out globally), the whole thing - cash, gold, crypto, stocks, bonds, property - everything falls apart.
You have to look at the reality. Crypto has been used overwhelmingly for scams and crime.
If "everything else fails" the internet has failed, and crypto will be worthless. Gold will probably still have some value, unless shit really hits the fan.
So has regular currency.
It's a sort-of flex, showing off, a demonstration of (energy) wealth. Humanities's peacock feathers.
Bitcoin is valuable because people accept that it’s valuable, same as with cash, gold, crypto, stocks, bonds, property. The price of an apple is $2 is because I offered it to you for $2 and you bought it.
These transactions while not the majority of transactions I would wager is far larger in terms of dollar value that the whole crypto ecosystem.
The reality is that criminals will find loop holes in a system and they will exploit it if it is worth exploiting. Many of the checks done in banks now impede transactions. I was buying a car (private seller) and I couldn't transfer the cash without going through a fraud check, even though I had signed the transaction with a card reader in the app. It turned a 30 minutes of test driving the vehicle and checking docs into 3 hours of wrangling on the phone. BTW I am not the only person having these problems with banks in the UK.
As for what crime we are referring to as well in this scenario needs clarifying as well. I suspect that most of crypto transactions are through darknet drug markets. These markets reduce the risk of violence to basically zero when purchasing drugs. While I am not one of these people that is pro-legalising all drugs, the reality is that people are going to buying them.
Gold is a bit different. You could stop mining it today entirely and you could still have a gold currency. Stop mining bitcoin and it all effectively disappears!