Are they really impossible to replace, though?

When you use them for work, not being tied to your computer is really nice.

Well, gold has the added benefit that it has served this purpose for thousands of years.

Would you really count on an extremely complex electronic currency requiring a distributed array of machines to get you through a major crisis?

Bitcoin is still around 30k a pop, so I wouldn’t say it’s dead yet. But I foresee a big crash in the months or years to come: the hype has passed, and the real uses of crypto are very few. It’s also not a good investment since the expected returns are 0. Once people finally realize that, I see the price falling to 1k or even less.