here is another important piece of info: a WALLET is not like the wallet you use for cash. A crypto wallet is just a program that manages your keys to make your life easier. If you lose access to your wallet that manages your keys, you don't have access to your keys...and that's a problem. BUT: You don't NEED to use a wallet in order to store your keys. You can just write them down.
And then there is the point - how do you split Gold in to many pieces to buy the proverbial loaf of bread, tank full of gas, plane ticket etc?
Yup like Google asking you if you want to store your passwords. Nah a little old hard copy notebook will do the trick.
K, that makes more sense. So if your original wallet (thumbdrive) dies in a fire, you could somehow access your BTC from the public ledger, which is stored in the ether, download them to a new wallet (thumbdrive) with your private key, and you are back to where you were before the fire?
https://counterparty.io/news/why-proof-of-burn/ If you lose the bitcoin private key to an address that contains an amount of bitcoin, you cannot transfer the bitcoins from that address to another address. The process is to sign the transaction with the corresponding private key and broadcast to the network Bitcoins are entries on a public ledger called the blockchain. Everyone who runs a full node has a copy of the blockchain. I have a copy as I run a full node wallet, it's over 370GB contains all the transaction history since genesis block 12 years ago. I also run a light wallet called Electrum that relies on public servers. Most important is the private key. If you have the private key, you can use any bitcoin wallet to either sweep the bitcoins that are on the corresponding address or import the address to your bitcoin wallet. Here's the private key Kx6UveGfBrpuTgYGNSqveh1NrUSFmjW9ZXPNZ3FziohXzq1GL4YX for this bitcoin address 1L14Y9KG8QHo1EBZ48PtRuHz6VgVTzcVsW Don't worry, it's empty, lol, and don't be sending bitcoins there. Remember, all you need is the private key to an address. That private key is very hard to memorize, but if you're creative, you can divide in 3 sections, create a fake email account and email first part to it. Create a fake facebook account and save it on your private chat with a friend. Create a fake dropbox account and and save the 3rd part as a text file. Voila, you can put an amount of bitcoins in there and you can go anywhere in the world and as long as you can access those 3 accounts you can recover the bitcoins stored in that address. Imho, it's not a good idea. You'd want to have some kind of backup system, but depends on what you're trying to do. If your memory is good and able to memorize 12 words you can have many addresses that you can access from anywhere in the world and you trust an online bitcoin wallet, counterparty has been around for a long time. I've stored over 5 bitcoins there in the past when the price of each bitcoin was a few hundred $ only, I would not do it now, in fact, I have dust amounts of bitcoins there now. https://wallet.counterwallet.io Play around with scenarios and be imaginative. Bitcoins are extremely secure, there are estimated to be about 1 Million bitcoins that belong to Satoshi that anyone can take and no one has managed to steal them as the private keys are not known to anyone. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/1L14Y9KG8QHo1EBZ48PtRuHz6VgVTzcVsW