The physical Ledger is as easy to crack as it is to guess your PIN in 3 attempts, which is…not easy. Your seed phrase, on the other hand, requires no cracking at all.
It’s not hard to safely store a seed phrase. Punch it in an inert metal and hide it in the substrate of your aquarium. Select a random book on your shelf and circle the words according to some kind of logic that you’ll remember. Bury them in a canister somewhere you can access. Concert them to their corresponding numbers. Put them in a safety deposit box if you trust your bank. Split it into a couple of pieces. Write it out of order, provided you know the cipher. What makes the most sense for you depends on your situation. The idea is to be inconspicuous, but also, they’re just words and not very special or interesting ones at that–hell, I might have typed some of your words in this comment. It’s the order that matters, so the main thing is to not draw attention to them like “here is a group of words that clearly has some significance”.
Ideally, you want a hypothetical thief to not know you have crypto at all. If I break into your house I’m going to assume the safe contains something valuable. If I’m just a casual thief I’m probably not prepared to mess with safes, so that’s fine, but let’s pretend I’m a pro and either break in or lift your safe (a quick tour of the Lockpicking Lawyer’s YouTube channel will show why confidence in anything short of high-end safes can be misplaced). Anyway, so I get inside, and here’s a weird USB thingy and beside it is a set of important-seeming words. Even if I know nothing about crypto, it’ll take me about 30 seconds of Googling to realize this discovery is very interesting indeed. To that end, unless you have a very good safe, I would argue you’re better off hiding your Ledger somewhere a thief isn’t going to be interested in in the first place, like in a baggie in the bottom of your flour jar in the pantry or something.
Conversely if a bad guy KNOWS you have crypto and cares to get it, he’s not going to mess with breaking in or decrypting your stuff. He’s going to social-engineer you into giving up your keys or (even easier) threaten Unpleasant Things ™ against you or someone you love if you don’t hand them over. So again–the best defense is keeping it completely secret that you have crypto at all.
Having said all of that: Many folks who hold crypto get into it because they have anti-establishment views, and like to imagine that bad guys or The Man are lurking around every corner just waiting to poach their crypto. For the most part that isn’t really true, and you’re way more likely to lose your assets due to some kind of stupidity or inattention on your own part. So there’s an argument that all of this is overanalysis. But, to the extent that there are indeed some bad guys out there and there are some real risks, not attracting their attention in the first place is always the best strategy.
Alright, I’ll bite.
Let’s say we eventually transition away from the military/industrial economic paradigm to a hypothetical AI/mathematical economic paradigm. What is the role of humans in such a scenario? You reference the money printer going brrrr as an inevitable response of an antiquated system to the rise of AIs, and I see your logic there, but it does point to a very real underlying issue: Mass employment and disenfranchisement. Later, you speculate about a new AI + blockchain-mediated economic paradigm reducing capital abuses, while in the same breath underlining how single AIs might replace entire sectors of human enterprise in doing so. Meanwhile, you refer to economic incentivization of (for example) kindness or other forms of capital that aren’t native to the current paradigm.
So, if all of this is precipitated by the self-destruction of the established paradigm as it attempts to cope with rampant unemployment and purposelessness, what do people actually do under the hypothetical new system that arises? To what end are they “employed”, or whatever takes the place of that concept? How are they “useful” to this new order, and how is that utility translated into success, prosperity, or fulfillment? Incentivization of kindness (or whatever) implies that some form of basically capitalistic framework will remain (albeit with “capital” being defined differently), but if AIs are fundamentally pulling the strings, what do they get out of such a deal? The existing paradigm revolves around the notion of “more”–entities wanting something better for themselves or their associates, and so on up the food chain, while possessing the agency and free will (or at least the illusions of these) to pursue it. How do the desires of the human population map onto those of the AIs such that humans will achieve a sense of fulfillment within the AI-mediated framework? Are we talking full-Matrix here, or full Star Trek, or something else altogether?
(Sidebar: We’re already seeing incentivization of things like kindness in social credit systems such as are being tested in China, so perhaps not that far fetched.)