All of your money is numbers on a screen

By Team BAC

What do you keep your money in?

For most of us, the answer is “numbers on a screen”. Those numbers are primarily bank accounts, credit limits, and investment accounts. If we’re a little matured with managing our money, most of it is held in stuff that isn’t immediately spendable, but hopefully growing over time, at least at whatever a high interest savings account offers, if not more. If we have a higher risk tolerance and some extra numbers about, some of those numbers are allocated to claims on that may fluctuate or be quite uncertain to return, but promise us significant returns when they do.

We also have physical things. Every time we buy anything physical, from food to clothing, to cars or nice furniture, we’re giving up those numbers in exchange claims on ownership of consumables or goods. You eat the food, delivered by app payment, sitting on a chair you bought with the same debit card, perhaps in an apartment whose autopay rent draws from a different checking account.

You can’t buy chairs with pizza. You can’t pay rent in chairs or chairs, but neither or from company equity or a Vanguard account.

Two things seem to be true:

1. You can’t store wealth physically
2. You can’t quickly liquidate stored wealth

You’re only allowed to store wealth as numbers on a screen or buy things. You’re only allowed to take lower rates of savings or investment. Wealth storage in the physical is impossible, and liquidity from stored wealth is complex and comes with permissions.

This is no longer true. BAC bars let you store wealth in a simple physical asset - gold, verified for purity, serialized for traceability, sealed for security. BAC bars convert gold from something that only a sketchy pawnshop or loanshark would deal with into a financial instrument. Want to stack your wealth up and have physical control over it? Now you can. Want to get liquidity out of your gold, from sales to loans, converting it into numbers on a screen (or paper)? Now you can.

Instead of being a subject of the banking system, you can stack your wealth. Instead of the only game in town being the stock market or crypto, you can store your wealth in something that’s universally valuable. And you can easily keep account of it and get dollars (or euros, or yen, etc.) liquidity whenever and if ever you want.

We’re not opposed to keeping your wealth in numbers on a screen and entries in someone else’s computer — particularly if it’s not any one person’s computer but a distributed ledger across a cryptographically secured network. We are big fans of that. We just think you might want to have the option not to, for a portion of it.