Ask HN: Cryptocurrencies value depends on existence of transaction ledger. Risk?

The following question has been wandering my mind for quite some time and I am highly interested in HN communties thoughts, since I don‘t find this question discussed anywhere:

If I buy any kind of asset (e.g. gold, stock etc.) basically the worth of the asset is independent of the exact transaction ledger. That is I can buy it offline or online, P2P or via a broker or an exchange etc., and in each case no matter what happens to the transaction ledger - e.g. broker / exchange / counterparty - it doesn't impact the worth of my asset once I own it.

However with cryptocurrencies their value is interwined so closely with the transaction ledger / blockchain, that basically I have no choice but to transact via the transacation ledger / blockchain of the respective cryptcurrency. As soon as the transcation ledger / blockchain becomes unavailable (for whatever reason) my individual coin ceases to exist.

Isn‘t this a huge drawback and risk related to cryptocurrencies that is hardly discussed?

tl;dr: All other assets' value is independent of transaction ledgger. Not Bitcoin et al. Isn't this a large downside / risk of cryptocurrencies that is hardly discussed?

The transaction ledger is just a permanent record of who owns each Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency.

Other assets values are not independent of their respective transaction ledgers. For example, the transaction ledger for real estate is the deed to the property, filed with the appropriate local authorities. If the paperwork is never completed, you're in for a helluva time when you try to sell or upgrade the property, and could easily find that you don't actually own the property you think you do.

The transaction ledger for a stock is the cap table of the company, and then once it gets to be publicly traded, the stock certificate (very often kept electronically for you by your brokerage). If the company goes under and gets liquidated, all of those stocks are worthless.

The transaction ledger for a currency is the government that backs it. When the government falls, so does the currency. Try paying for things with Continental or Confederate dollars, or Reichsmarks, or Rhodesian dollars. In the U.S, we haven't experienced a government collapse since 1865, so there's nobody with living memory of what it's like to have all your assets become worthless and your property forcibly seized from you.

But in much of the rest of the world, these are common occurrences. I suspect a lot of the demand for Bitcoin is coming from geographic locales where there are people alive who know just how unreliable other forms of asset ownership are. The blockchain is significantly more secure than many governments around the world.

The best way for a ledger to work is to have a Universal Identifier for each component of an asset. Can't work for Gold, which can be melted down and reformed. But will work great for things like recorded land deeds. And perhaps childbirths where the SSN(in the USA) is assigned immediately.

Registering immutable assets can be very useful.