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Bitcoin does not cost anything to store, though you do have to spend some time learning how to self-custody securely. It's a lot easier than it was ten years ago, very low risk of losing your keys or having them stolen if you do it well.
Storage costs of gold are overblown. You can fit a million dollars of gold in a standard $70 a year safe deposit box. GoldMoney.com or BullionVault.com will store it for you with high security for 0.1% a year -- so that is a 2% loss over 20 years. That is far less than the numbers cited in the article for the monetary dilution losses from holding cash in a bank.
Unless someone knows that in your brain is the key to $100,000 of untraceable, irrecoverable currency, in which case a 9mm held to your knee is sort of a universal key. With crypto transactions being, ideally, irreversible and untraceable, it's much riskier than gold coins because you can't even catch the guy with the gold. Alternatively, if crypto transactions are traceable and reversible, you are at the mercy of the government system, they can confiscate your money without even sending out the goon squad.
You have me on the safe deposit box, but I'm not sure I'd really trust a storage company with a significant fraction of my net worth. My bank can't fiddle with the numbers, I can show my math and my records. What do you do if your gold comes out lighter. Probably paranoia, I'm not sure that any of that is accurate, just vibes.
Unfortunately safe deposit boxes are steadily disappearing as a bank service across the US. And they're not exactly safe from Government intervention either.
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Do not tell anyone who much crypto you have. For a wrench attack, the thief would have to know how much you have, otherwise you just open up a side wallet and only give them a small portion of your funds. Also, you can use multisig or split up your seed so that you literally could not give an attacker your keys on the spot even if you wanted to.
But yeah, given a high enough rate of crime, nothing is safe, kidnapping loved ones is always a risk, no matter what form of wealth you hold.
Safe deposit boxes aren't perfect as bank customer service has declined. There are horror stories about banks shutting down a branch and not properly notifying customers and the deposit boxes ending up in limbo somewhere.
Which is practical, as long as Crypto is an extremely marginal aspect of both the world economy and your personal net worth, or you live as a kind of digital nomad cyberpunk gray man. But it rather precludes it as a primary store of value for settled individuals and communities as a whole. If we ever reached a point where most wealth was stored through crypto, you would just have to target random rich people.
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