Not really....not at these rates anyways. There isn’t much difference between putting your money in the bank or under your mattress, well, except for convenience and safety issues.
Yes, it is. If you keep the money physically it yields exactly zero and nobody is using it. If you lend the money (to a bank or someone else) you get some interest (or not, in some countries interest rates are negative) AND there is someone else who can use that money. Bank deposits are fundamentally different from “hoarding” gold or bitcoins.
Sure, but the banks don’t thank us much for the pleasure. Money, gold, bitcoins aren’t themselves stores of value, merely IOUs. To really store value (I.e. production), you need things like grain silos.
