I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Even Crypto's most ardent supporters would not disagree that prices are volatile - which means that it doesn't suit

I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Even Crypto's most ardent supporters would not disagree that prices are volatile - which means that it doesn't suit my stated requirement that there's never a bad time to liquidate the investment (if my roof springs a leak right as WhateverCoin takes a nosedive, I'm shit out of luck). I will admit that I've never invested in gold, but if you're talking buying actual literal physical gold then I can't imagine that it can be liquidated as quickly as would be necessary; and, whether you're talking about buying literal gold or an abstract investment tied to Gold, I'd be very surprised to hear that it has an appreciation rate that beats HYSAs - and hey, if it does, I'm extremely grateful to you for pointing out an alternative investment strategy to diversify with! To be clear, my requirements are: * Near-instantly liquidatable (a day is maybe ok, hours is better). * Value is not volatile - explicitly, extremely high likelihood that, whenever I need to extract value from it, the value will not have significantly lowered (I assume there's some economic theorem which states that this puts an upper bound on the interest I can expect to earn). * A distant third is "combats inflation as much as possible", but I recognize that a lower interest rate will be earned because of the first two requirements. EDIT: > the only way to protect yourself is by holding cash and taking the loss as some sort of convenience cost. I'd say that there are other ways to hold liquid funds that try to combat inflation beyond just gambling in the stock market. I suspect we may have our priorities crossed. I'm not trying to hold liquid funds that try to combat inflation - I'm trying to hold liquid funds that have a strong guarantee of non-volatility. I agree with you that if the constraint of volatility is relaxed, then there are many better (higher-rate-of-return) options than a HYSA.