This is post is taken from the Frequently Asked Questions.

Step 1 should be to convert as much of the depreciating currency (fiat) as you can into a currency that can never be debased. Bitcoin is a threat to the government’s monopoly on money and you should want to hold as much of it as you can.

Then just hold or as bitcoiners say, HODL. Some people say this stands for “hold on for dear life,” but it actually was a spelling mistake on a Reddit postfrom 2013!

More and more businesses are beginning to accept bitcoin. But until the world switches to the Bitcoin standard, most transactions in everyday life will be in trading bitcoin back into dollars whenever the temporary need for more dollars arises. 

The two most popular ways to use bitcoin are by sending transaction on the main chain (“on-chain”) or by using a layer 2 solution called Lightning. There are custodial and non-custodial ways of doing both. Custodial is like your typical bank or investment account. You have access to the money on there as long as the bank or investment firm lets you access it. If the bank decides to freeze your accounts, then you can no longer access those funds because the custodian is the one ultimately in charge.

An example of a bitcoin custodian would be using a company like Strike. You hook up your checking account and buy bitcoin. As long as the bitcoin remains on your account held by Strike, the bitcoin is in their custody. If someone forced them to send your bitcoin somewhere or freeze your account, they would have to comply. Strike and all reputable custodians lets you remove the bitcoin into your own custody as soon as the funds settle. Strike has both the ability to send and receive Lightning payments as well as on-chain payments. A cool feature with them is that you can send a Lightning payment using dollars. It will be seamlessly converted into bitcoin and sent while from your end, you will just see dollars come out of your attached checking account.

Non-custodial is more commonly called self-custodial and means that you are the one in charge of your bitcoin. If you forget your password, PIN, or lose the private keys to your bitcoin, it is gone forever and no one will ever be able to help recover it. 

Self-custody also lets you have access to your money even in the most oppressive countries. It makes it easy to put all your wealth into bitcoin and leave the country to start a new life elsewhere. The same can’t be said about cash, gold, or real estate. Imagine trying to cross the border carrying bags and bags of cash or bars of gold. Small amounts would be fine but larger amounts would be impossible to travel with safely. 

If the people that had held their bitcoin in FTX had instead moved it immediately into self-custody, the FTX bankruptcy would not have affected them at all. Any reputable exchange should encourage if not require moving coins into self-custody.

Christian organizations are sending bitcoin as the currency of choice to their missionaries overseas. Many of these missionaries are in areas of the world where it is difficult or very costly to send US dollars or even to send dollars and get it converted into the local currency. Relying on the legacy system means jumping through multiple layers. In addition to fees, the legacy system is also slow. By using Bitcoin, these organizations are able to send large or small amounts of bitcoin nearly instantaneously to anywhere in the world. The missionaries are then able to spend the bitcoin as they need or to convert the bitcoin to the local currency at their convenience.

The Thank God For Bitcoin organization (https://tgfb.com) is an excellent resource for more information about how other churches are using bitcoin.

Two excellent videos on this are:

Funding Ministry in an Expensive Time & Place

How Bitcoin Transforms Funding for Global Missions with Ahshuwah Hawthorne