Bitcoin future possibilities:

ATTACK:

1) Banks start doing banker things with retail bitcoin deposits

2) Banks lose the bitcoin many voters entrusted to them

3) US passes a law or president enacts a decree that all bitcoin debts are payable in dollars or they create a bitcoin fork that creates new coins to offset the loss and create an insurance fund and mandate the 1 for 1 exchange rate for bitcoin.

4) US does a 6102 on self custody bitcoin and, as the constitution requires, compensates people with dollars or their new fork of bitcoin.

DEFENSE:

1) Laws get written to prevent banks from doing banker things that lead to bitcoin loss.

2) banks and depositors enter in to a timed multisig arrangement where user key can spend funds at any time or bank key can spend funds after a time out…if user loses key but still wants to spend bitcoin, bank lends user bitcoin until timelock expires and then issues a transaction sending depositor funds to the new depositor key while repaying loan plus interest.

3) in this model, user need not ever hold their own key if they don’t want to take the security risk…and likely many people won’t hold their own key…most people will just pay a small fee that they view as the cost of payment processing. But the option of user managing their own payments in a manner that is essentially cost free to the bank can still exist. The advantage to this arrangement is that which key spends the funds can determine who used the funds and for what. If your bank balance went to zero when your bank bought treasuries to back your deposits or if your retirement account went to zero when your brokerage lent out your stock/bond shares, you’d notice!