The alarm is sounding. How will you prepare?

You wake in the middle of the night and something is wrong. A faint smell. Smoke, perhaps. You lie still and run through what it could be; something left on the stove, a neighbour’s backyard fire pit, your own mind doing what it does at three in the morning. In those few seconds, before you have decided a single thing, you are already making the only calculation that matters.

Get up, and you lose a little sleep. You walk through the dark house, check the stove, the sockets, the basement, the furnace room, find nothing, and climb back into bed. That is the whole cost of being wrong.

Stay where you are, and most nights you would be right. Be wrong, with the smell real and the house alight, and the cost is your home and everything in it.

Notice that nobody, lying in that bed, reaches for the probability. You do not think, the odds of a fire on any given night are low, therefore I will stay put. You get up. You get up because the two outcomes are not the same size, and somewhere below conscious thought you already know it.

Smoke is only the example. We have all known the feeling in some form, the sense that something is off, the one we are right not to wave away. Put in its place whatever would pull you out of bed.

Hold on to that feeling, because it is the same decision people find far harder once it is dressed in the language of money.

The same choice, in daylight

Digital currencies are coming; the world’s central banks have made that clear, and the only real uncertainty left is the date. The feature that matters is built into them from the start, their programmability. The open question is whether that power is ever turned against the person holding it, so that the money in your account can be told what it may do, when, and on whose terms. Whether that day is years away or already taking shape, the smoke in the night logic holds, so leave the timing to one side.

That question, whether the programmable power is ever turned against you, is the negative outcome the matrix below sets out. The decision has only four outcomes. Two follow from preparing, and two from doing nothing.

I would far rather be wrong and prepared than right and unprepared.

The same four outcomes, drawn out.

Three of the four you could live with, though not as equals. Two come from a sound decision. Prepared, you are either protected when it matters, or, if the event never comes, you have moved a portion of your wealth to safer ground, a reallocation that costs no more to hold than where it sits today. The third, lucky, you can live with too, yet it was never the right call; the event did not come, and chance covered for you. The fourth cannot be undone, exposed when you most need your money, having seen it coming and done nothing. Notice where Exposed sits; the left column holds both it and Protected, the best outcome of all. When the negative outcome comes, preparation is the one thing that separates the two.

Which could you live with

Moving a portion of your wealth into gold is the allocation the research on how gold behaves in a portfolio has supported for decades.¹ If you hold gold precisely because it answers to no government, then leaving it in a domestic brokerage account makes little sense, in the very country and system you were trying to step outside of. The answer is to hold it directly, and abroad. There is no real opportunity cost here. Gold earns its place through diversification; it has a low correlation to stocks and bonds, and often does well when they falter, which is much of why a holding tends to steady a portfolio.

The other side is far graver. To skip it, and be wrong about the risk, is to be locked out of your own money when you can least afford it, with only luck to have saved you. We are each built differently, and only you know your answer; I know mine. I would far rather be wrong and prepared than right and unprepared.

No one can name the day, and you do not need to. What this asks is only that you are ready before it comes, which is the one part within your control. Of the two regrets a person can carry, having prepared and never needed it is by far the lighter one.

Set the same choice on a grid of value against effort, and it falls in the top left corner everyone wants, high in value and low in effort, an afternoon of paperwork standing between you and a protected share of your wealth. The matrix above shows the move is wise. One built on value and effort would show it is easy too.

Perhaps this is the first of these essays you have read, ahead of the rest of the case. Nothing here rests on my word; the others set out the full argument, with the sources behind it. They are there whenever you want them, and the conclusion is yours.

A fire gives one faint warning, if you are fortunate, and the people who get up at the smell are the ones who get out in time. It is why we wire our homes with detectors, to catch the danger while it is still only a smell. On money, the alarms are already sounding; more than 140 countries are now exploring a central bank digital currency,² the story I tell in “Strings attached.” The smoke is in the air, and the easiest thing in the world is to roll over and go back to sleep. There is still time to get up and check the house. If you have decided that acting makes sense, the only hard part left is where to hold it, and when you are ready, that is the part I can take off your hands.

Footnotes

1. Independent research on gold’s place in a portfolio clusters in the 10% to 20% range: Bank for International Settlements, “What share for gold?” (Working Paper 906, Zulaica, 2020), https://www.bis.org/publ/work906.htm ; Van Vliet & Lohre, “The Golden Rule of Investing” (2023), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4404688 ; WisdomTree, “Rethinking the Golden Allocation,” https://www.wisdomtree.com/investments/blog/2025/11/18/rethinking-the-golden-allocation ; In Gold We Trust report (Incrementum), ingoldwetrust.report. The case is set out in “How much gold?” on this site. ↩

2. More than 140 countries (146 as of May 2026), representing over 98% of global GDP, are exploring a central bank digital currency. Source: Atlantic Council, CBDC Tracker, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/ ↩