Good day and happy new year my friend! :)

Any investment analogies for resistance band? 😅

I've done some research and programming experiments with Hysteresis which has some analog with resistance bands, however I'm not prepared to expound more on it at the moment. I'll just say it has to do with engineering the gaining and losing of stats and/or rewards due to success and failure in games.

Cash ... never keeps up with inflation.

Might be the time to grab a high interest CD. Might be the only way to have your cash paying a higher interest rate than inflation if your CD interest is locked for a long enough time period and inflation comes down to below that rate maybe in a few months or a year.

gold backed currency that has real value? (or BTC backed?)

Gold has held value universally for thousands of years mainly because its somewhat scarce and easy to make into shiny and/or useful things. One main "purpose" or having shiny things is to show others that you're wealthy or well off. See Conspicuous consumption. There is some possibility that due to AI and robotics advancing quickly, that there will no longer be a need for human labor in 5 years and we'll reach a true state of abundance where everyone feels wealthy. For more on this and AI in general, see videos by super genius David Shapiro like this one.

Also Gold is useful due to it's physical and chemical properties. But material science is also rapidly advancing and gold may be overshadowed soon.

Further, how do you know what someone says is gold, is really made of gold? You have to do a Metallurgical assay, or just believe whoever is holding gold really has real gold. Some say gold is a hedge against some unspecified future disaster, but when it comes time to buy and sell food and necessities with gold, will we really have full certainty of what might look like gold? So I don't think gold is quite the hedge against a bad future as some say. In addition to the above, you have to store it and transport it, which could easily expose you to risk of theft.

Maybe 2024 will be the year low stockpiles of some minerals gets more attention??

Near me is a shut down Lithium mine which is in the News because it may be reopened due to demand for Lithium for batteries. But recently I read of <a href=:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery">Sodium batteries. Point being, again in this rapidly changing world (now more than ever due to AI) we can't predict as easily the future value of minerals. Maybe ones that are easier to extract and are extracted by existing operations might be good for short term plays. But thinking about Lithium mines which won't be profitable for years, for example, might not work out well.

Crypto and Zing in particular - very risky as I said in the article. If something doubles, sell half so your skin in the game is ZERO, then sleep at night no matter what happens! :)

As always, not financial advice. I may not know what the heck I am talking about. I'm just somebody online saying things that come to mind. Do your own research, obviously. :)