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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

I have long been terrified of something shaped a bit like this. Here in the US we already treat most workers like absolute garbage. If one day the Average Joe wakes up and finds that all his money is merely some electronic scribbles in a database which have mysteriously gone missing, the social unrest is probably something that most people on this site couldn't even conceptualize of.

Today it's Zelle, but what happens when you and everyone you know wake up and check your bank account and get an error. Suddenly can't buy food? So on. Sure, they keep backups. You hope. Do they test restoration? What would have to go wrong deep in the depths of a financial system creaking along on 1970s technology in order to really throw a wrench in things?

View on HN

I work for a bank in the US, and not one of the names you hear associated with scandals all the time. The level of redundancy and HA built into our everything is why our jobs are so boring and slow. We also use a core banking platform that lots of other banks use and it's properly engineered for the kind of enterprise performance we'd all expect. There are certainly problems in banking, but the FDIC protections are also there for consumers. Let's start with a reasonable premise, not a fear-mongering one.

I’ll be the 10th man and add to the nihilism. Consumer protections are there not for the consumer, but to create some sort of artificial social stability through recourse and take the wind out of any social uprising.

I'm confused by your nihilism. If the outcome is that I can get my money back (and I would argue that 250k covers a VAST majority of people, and then some), isn't that a fair trade for me not killing and eating a banker?

Consumer protections are likely to be 3 months out from the point of impact. As the saying goes, we're all 3 hot meals from the end of society.

If we're in a hypothetical world where a major bank lost say millions of bank accounts and for some reason it was going to take months to correct it would hit the news, there would be emergency legislation blocking eviction, utility shutoff, and debt collection, and interest accrual as well as all the lost bank accounts being credited with a some amount as combination fine/stimulus.

The fear is when it's just you.

Landlords tolerate eviction moratorium with covid because only a fraction of their tenants stopped paying.

I think a scenario where just a few million or whatever were effected you are correct. However if it was almost everyone, landlording would become a straight up mob. You'd have to employ violence and bypass the state to maintain the properties and enterprise. No one would rent out property the legal way if they couldn't collect the rents.

> However if it was almost everyone

By the time it got to this another disaster already happened

You are assuming that the institutions offering the protection will follow through for when you need them to. I don't mind people who do believe these promises made to them, but I certainly understand those who don't.

True consumer protection would allow people to have immediate remediation (rather than on a weeks-to-months timeline), and also hold the responsible parties accountable beyond a fine that’s a rounding error in terms of profits.

> The level of redundancy and HA built into our everything is why our jobs are so boring and slow

I have also done this, and I can't say I agree. This is certainly one issue but the real issue is that these companies are not run by tech people. The tech is simply another cost center and gets no vote on how things are run. Many tech firms have equal amounts of redundancy but still manage not to have such terrible software

> these companies are not run by tech people

This is a huge problem, I agree, but it's not why the redundancy and HA get built the way it does. That's still coming from IS in the orgs I've had exposure too. The business side would rather we do things quicker and easier and not put as many technical roadblocks to vendor selection and build roadmaps.

> engineered for the kind of enterprise performance

It took me a while to realize that this is the first time in ages (outside of cringeworthy marketing materials) I’ve seen “enterprise” used as something other than a pejorative!

> one day the Average Joe wakes up and finds that all his money is merely some electronic scribbles in a database which have mysteriously gone missing, the social unrest is probably something that most people on this site couldn't even conceptualize

This overdramatises commonplace clerical errors.

It happened in Argentina. One day people woke up and their USD access basically gone.

> happened in Argentina

That’s expropriation, not bank error. And there was very little unrest (EDIT: resulting from the expropriation per se).

If you’re concerned about that risk, an offshore bank account is better protection than physical assets within the expropriating government’s jurisdiction.

>very little unrest

... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/20/argentina2

>If you’re concerned about that risk, an offshore bank account is better protection than physical assets within the expropriating government’s jurisdiction.

Due to FATCA Americans are pariahs in the global banking system. For grocery money probably not going to happen.

The ‘01 riots were a symptom of economic collapse. I don’t recall any significant contemporaneous attribution to the expropriation of U.S. dollars in bank accounts, which mostly hit the rich.

> Due to FATCA Americans are pariahs in the global banking system

For grocery money, a second bank account is sufficient. For expropriation risk, opening an offshore account as an American is nontrivial, but far from pariah status. (For that experience, say you’re Russian.)

It's interesting to characterize economic collapse as unrelated to access to foreign currency for international trade. Also interesting to presume what happens to the rich, who are often the employer and owners, doesn't cause issues for the rest of the economy and the employees of the rich.

Also bear in mind that in the US it is a rich person's game indeed to hold foreign currency. But in Latin America and especially Argentina USD is far more common in the common man's hand.

> interesting to characterize economic collapse as unrelated to access to foreign currency for international trade

This jumps the rhetorical shark. Nobody said they’re unrelated. Just that the unrest is a response to the collapse. It would have occurred if the government seized dollars or not. The dollar seizure was a response to the collapse.

I acknowledge neither of our theories can be proven but it just seems too far fetched to me the unrest was attributable to everything but the banking measures.

> it just seems too far fetched to me the unrest was attributable to everything but the banking measures

Temporary and permanent capital controls have a long history of peaceful implementation. Economic collapses do not.

An important consideration here is unrest is in part in response to perceived factors in the economic collapse. Even if one takes the position the measures are not the cause of the collapse they can still be a cause of unrest.

> if one takes the position the measures are not the cause of the collapse they can still be a cause of unrest

You’re missing that the measures have been taken in other contexts without unrest, e.g. Iceland, Cyprus, FDR’a gold confiscation. If X always precedes Y, and Z sometimes does but sometimes doesn’t (and when it does, is twinned with X), and we witness X, Z and Y, X is the dominant explanation for Y.

" there are four kinds of countries: developed countries, underdeveloped countries, Japan, and Argentina."

-- Simon Kuznets

Kuznets' quote is about international finance. Not social unrest. The factors that lead Argentina to collapse are uniquely Argentinian. What happened after that is unsurprising.

>Kuznets' quote is about international finance. >Not social unrest.

This is a contradiction. You said social unrest is caused by financial collapse. International finance in a globally integrated economy like Argentina then necessarily becomes a piece of the financial collapse that causes unrest.

Can’t tell if you’re trolling at this point, but it’s not a contradiction, and you’ve ignored the numerous counterfactuals more applicable to America.

Lol while we're going with the troll accusation (yeah I realize you said "trolling" not "troll" but it's just a back-door to the ad-hominem attack), I'd like to point out the person refusing the relation of the banking measures which came immediately before the riots (and even have a wikipedia page which describes the subsequent anger and violence) as somehow being not a cause of the unrest, is a self described ex "investment banker." Who'd of guessed it.

commonplace??

Imagine the horror when the government declares that the physical money you owned will have no value after one month and you have to exchange it for a replacement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

Isn’t this what happened during the Great Depression? Exactly what you described except instead of “scribbles in a database” it’s people’s physical money in banks. This is literally where the term “bank run” comes from

The depression certainly had unrest, idk how great but it happened in the 1930s so I would expect things would be much worse if something like that were to happen today.

A bank run comes from people running to the bank to withdraw all of their money from their accounts to keep it as cash and essentially bankrupting a bank, causing shockwaves in credit markets.

It's not really the same thing as the money suddenly nullified which I think the original commenter is describing. A better analogy might be to say it's like everyone waking up and seeing their 401k suddenly says 0$.

Different in that that wasn't a case of losing records.

It was the delicately balanced house of cards that is fractional reserve banking all of a sudden crashing down, and pulled back the veil to temporarily reveal to everyone that money isn't real, and even though we remember who all has what, it only works if the masses don't look behind the curtain.

Wouldn't FDIC insurance cover this? For the average person they'd be fine, if they have over 250k in the bank then they aren't the average person

Having worked in many banks ledger systems are extraordinarily redundant. This won’t happen, even in a fight club scenario.

I understand the idea of "if you take everything from someone, what makes them keep to the law", but it's pretty obvious people don't work that way.

There are plenty of scam victims who lose all their savings to individuals or groups. How many of them do you hear of visiting the scammers' office with a pump gun? The sue, they hope for justice, they drink themselves to death, but that's about it. There are some exceptions, but they're super rare.

I mean, people are not robots, but I think it's pretty obvious people do work that way.

Famously, one of the factors in the collapse of the USSR was people realizing society was breaking and starting to work with grey market or criminal groups. You can search for the impact on crime of basically ANY social support program (sanctuary cities[1], substance abuse treatment[2], SNAP[3]) and they all reduce crime.

How people deal with a lack of resources is highly personal. It's true that few of them track down and murder the people who stole from them (it's hard and also most people don't want to kill others). But again, it's extremely well established that people with more going for them commit fewer crimes.

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-effects-of-sanc...

[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22610

[3] https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/101/2/310/58516...

This is intuitive but wrong; the balance of evidence is that poverty does not drive people to crime.

During economic contractions in the west for example, crime does not spike. 2008, or even the great depression: No crime jump.

In the past in the west, when everyone was much poorer (1960's back to 19th century) crime was often substantially lower even than now. We're talking 1930's slums here.

Poverty correlates with crime, but the causation is probably the other way: Crime destroys wealth of a community.

Or it might be a third cause: The kind of people who commit a lot of crime in their community are also the kind who are economically dysfunctional in general and will create poverty for themselves.

It's not that poverty causes all crime. Wealthy people commit different crimes than poor people. [1]

You bring up the 2008 recession, but the poverty rate, rose from ~12% to ~15%[2]. A meaningful but not earth-moving change. Median wages did not decrease [3], suggesting that the rise in poverty would be from job loss, which has not been shown to have a simplistic, direct relationship to crime [4]. The fact that poverty is not the most important factor in crime does not mean it is not a factor.

That is all to say - poverty (and in a wider sense forms of desperation) are not the sole force driving crime, but they are a force for certain crimes. Again, it's very reliable that you can reduce crime with better social support. That's not to say that crime == poverty, just that it's one of many factors that influence people.

[1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-socialproblems/chapte...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-s...

[3] https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/private/pdf/154286/...

[4] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/unemploy...

With extreme poverty, you'd probably see some increase in crime. But I doubt you'll see social unrest, unless it's very specific, e.g. you cut off welfare to some ethnic group in the US, and it'll need some level of coordination behind it. I doubt the government will allow that kind of organization for a large scale issue where "the system" is at stake and it's not just some local racial riot.

Have you seen Mr Robot? Something similar happens in the show, good watching for anyone on HN.

I know people working for banks in France and they basically have bugs sometimes where their customers are debited or credited twice. It’s a bunch of legacy xml protocols used for settlements and they sometimes have to pull a bunch of people to manually go through the books and fix mistakes. It’s insane to me that not more has blew up so far. I guess in a way banks truly are decentralized and so one bank fucking up doesn’t necessarily affect other banks.

I saw this happen with my own eyes in 2008 -- the trick was to re-order transactions such that an overdraft is triggered before other small transactions, to rack up overdraft charges.

Secondly, a Wells Fargo in California told a daily customer at the window in a bank "your cash deposit will not be credited until the next day" ..

both of these stories are completely true, at the same time as the Washington Mutual Bank failure.

There was a 1 week time when I had literally 0 to my name because all my money was tied up in bank transfers. It was unnerving.

When zelle first came out, my bank fudged an api call and basically sent my money backwards... which made the transfer crash. Took me a month, they couldn't recover the transfer and just had to credit me the missing cash.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't daily carry a physical debit card to your largest accounts that could be easily lost or stolen. Take advantage of credit card protections, or cash.

Plopping your life savings in one large savings account has never been a good idea.

> Plopping your life savings in one large savings account has never been a good idea.

Yeah, it should be in a tax advantaged retirement account.

20 years ago I wrote software to automatically scan paper checks, OCR and MICR data, and then do ACH transactions...

After seeing all the problems and insecurity in the banking system I now keep at minimum of 1 month of expenses in hard cash in my safe at all times, and I have multiple accounts at different credit unions, and I stop using banks completely.

I think about this too, but I'm not terrified, I'm excited.

What a great opportunity it would be to build something new based on things we actually value and not on threats made by dead men:

> This gold thing with my face on it is more valuable than other gold things without my face, and if you disagree I'll kill you.

-- Julius Caesar

... and we've been following that pattern ever since.

I get your point but I trust 1970s tech a bit more than modern tech.

Sounds like Blade Runner 2049 is predictive programming.

This is literally the plot of Mr. Robot.

If you have enough money in the bank to buy groceries you have enough money to take out of the bank and put in your mattress for groceries.

Also HN will probably get upset for me saying this but a few grams of gold or silver or other goods easily tradeable like whiskey or ammo never hurt anybody and might buy you a pig to slaughter or something.

> few grams of gold or silver

I remember, a few years ago, Cupertino being targeted for burglaries because the Indian and Taiwanese immigrant populations had a penchant for storing wealth in gold and silver and cash under the mattress, respectively. The victims’ recovery rates and timelines were far poorer than these BofA customers’ will be.

Which is an interesting comparison because these are not the only immigrant populations that do this, there are large groups of immigrant populations in Texas who are largely unbanked or underbanked or have cultural penchants for using gold and silver as stores of value, but there has been no concerted effort to burglarize them, because strings of home invasions in Texas usually end up with the home invaders in a body bag regardless of who they decide to target.

Can you help my understand why this article cites a higher per capita burglary rate in Texas than California (it claims the data is from the FBI)? https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist...

Why does Texas has so many reported burglaries though?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-report...

Probably because these statistics are based on reported burglaries as opposed to the actual number of burglaries. It's my impression from various threads and news articles that people in California have given up on reporting all sorts of crimes due to the lack of prosecution.

Must be the same situation in Florida then?

California is a big place with a lot of varying community attitudes... that sounds like quite a big assumption.

Because stolen guns are very valuable and the owners have to officially report them stolen to avoid all the possible criminal charges.

People report gun theft in order to make possession of it unambiguously a crime same as with cars and other serialized property.

Nobody with a brain actually thinks the police in the next state over are gonna seriously suspect them of something when their handgun inevitably gets recovered in an unrelated crime.

1: The data is obviously completely bogus unless you believe there were only 11 burglaries in Florida in all of 2021. You can't draw anything from it.

2: Texas is the second most populous state, so total # has little value. You need the per capita number to understand whether their might be some deterrence happening. Unfortunately the Statista data is garbage, so it isn't worth calculating.

So where is a good source of data?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...

Statista is proven untrustworthy, so I'd start with the FBI UCRs:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s

Thanks for that link. Looks like its a mixed bag between Texas and California. Out of the 9 crime statistics, California is better for 5 while Texas is better for 4. And sometimes the differences are small. For example for burglary, the rate is 392.8 for Texas while 392.8 for while 386.1 for California.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

This is false.

Texas and California are roughly tied in burglaries per capita, 370.7 and 369.7 per 100,000. New Mexico has the most, at 648.8/100,000. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/232580/burglary-rate-in-...) Interestingly, New Mexico has a bit more than three times as many guns per capita as Texas. (https://www.statista.com/chart/21894/firearms-in-each-state/)

Property crime rates are going to be suppressed in Texas among the (undocumented) immigrant population because of a justifiable lack of trust between them and police. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.22221) The NCVS should give better data, but I'm damned if I can find it.

That happens a lot in many segments of the population. When my uncle was detective, there were similar incidents among the orthodox Jewish community, as the cultural preference from the diamond trade was instant settlement. It’s also easier to move gold across borders. Many folks were hesitant to call the police which made it worse.

Prepper people get targeted alot as well. One dude in my hometown was a victim of a home invasion, held hostage and lost about $250k of guns, ammo and silver. You don’t hear alot of about this stuff because typically these communities are not exactly following the letter of the law from a tax perspective.

He could have prepared better.

The recovery rates and timelines are only relevant for the cost. The key part is that its failure is uncorrelated with bank failure. It's not either/or, but rather multi-source redundancy.

People have no trouble conceptualizing insurance. We have car insurance, home-owners insurance, life insurance, etc.

But what about "every day life" insurance? It doesn't take much cash on hand or some staples in the cupboard to protect against a wide variety of temporary "glitches" in life. Glitches can be anything from surprise weather events to things like your bank accounts becoming temporarily unavailable.

Importantly, insurance is not an investment we intend to get a return on. It's a cost.

Heh, I didn’t even notice the covid paper products shortage on accounts of having every day life insurance in the form of a Costco membership and having bought toilet paper some months before. Buying in bulk isn’t even a cost, the cost of capital sitting idle in the form of a shelf of stuff I won’t need for a long time is more than made up for with the volume discount.

Not only are the bulk beans a tiny fraction of the cost per bean, they’re fresher and higher quality.

Also it is an investment that returns in time savings. Buying 50 rolls of TP takes the same amount of time as buying 1.

Same here, we try and keep 3 months supply of groceries on hand from costco at all times. Once a month we look through what won't last 3 more months and stock up, and once you actually figure out what you need it's surprisingly cheap. For example we skipped our December trip because of the holidays and so spent around $1100 for our family of six. Which sounds like a lot but when you stretch it out over 2 or 3 months that less than $100 a person. I'd recommend everyone who can does this.

you have any tips for managing expiration dates? Me and the wife were getting into this subject recently. I'm considering buying a barcode scanner and just have an in and out spreadsheet that somehow I manage. Still tinkering with a few ideas. We have a big family and there's potential for a lot of food waste if not managed properly.

The way we do it is we just take the new stuff and put it at the back so the oldest stuff is at the front. The other thing is we only buy things we know we eat regularly. So we have 3 months worth of applesauce, goldfish crackers.

We also freeze anything that isn't in a can or a sealed, so bread we usually buy 4 loaves and freeze 2 or 3, and accept we'll have to get more from the store before we go.

The limitation is we can't get things from Costco that aren't used regularly, for example, we don't go through enough cream cheese to buy Costco size, and it doesn't account for all our food needs. But if tomorrow I lost my job we know we could survive without having to go to the store for anything but milk and eggs* for the next month or two.

* Hopefully we'll remedy this in the summer with chickens.

Yah physical arrangements to support turnover are good. That's so true on that point about the rate of consumption for different food types is just irregular.

I've been contemplating somehow tracking the pounds of food bought per trip as a quick informer on the spot. The tricky thing is that the kids are growing so their consumption has a steady ramp but not yet enough for a timely consumption of stuff like cream cheese etc. Lots of products seem to be in the 2lb range. 2lb is actually a good deal of food I'm finding out.

The problem with buying in bulk is that it requires the money up-front and that works only if you can save enough money at least once. Poor people can be permanently cash-strapped, so they never manage to get to the point for that upfront investment.

Money up-front AND storage space.

I can't help you with the $ problem, but if storage space is your limiting factor you can buy commercially packaged "survival food" that comes in #10 cans and/or 5-gallon buckets. A 2-week supply of food at 2k calories per day takes up about 2 5-gallon buckets. #10 cans can be stored under a bed. You'll additionally need water and a way to heat it. I think most of them can be eaten cold, but that seems very unpleasant.

This, obviously, is a different strategy than buying bulk and cycling through your regular eating. A 1-2 week supply is plenty for most people. You aren't trying to become a prepper, you're just wanting to get through a crazy blizzard/hurricane/whatever.

...and transportation

For elaboration, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

This only works if you don't live in a dense city. People in cities simply don't have space to store (many) bulk purchases, and the stores near them (i.e. that don't need a car) don't sell things in bulk (transporting bulk items by public transport is not feasible, and it's too expensive by Uber).

When I visit friends who live in dense cities they are very excited that I have a car, and often ask me to take them to make some bulk purchases.

I don't think that's accurate. The bigger issue is economic access - poor people can't afford to stock up since they are often living paycheque to paycheque. Even middle class folks living in dense urban centres have access to car shares and delivery services. Yes there is a cost, but it's usually quite cheap.

As for storage, except for the smallest apartments, most storage spaces can be optimized quite a bit for very little cost just by purchasing containers that fit spaces properly, have good seals, and abandoning commercial packaging, especially for products that are packed for shelf appeal, not bulk storage.

> poor people can't afford to stock up

Sure, that's a problem. But that's not the problem I was talking about.

> have access to car shares and delivery services. Yes there is a cost, but it's usually quite cheap.

It is most definitely not cheap! You can't buy much because you don't have room, and the cost savings of what you can buy are destroyed by this added expense, making it pointless.

> most storage spaces can be optimized quite a bit

Sure - up to a point. I mean you can also just fill your bedroom with stuff, and have a narrow corridor to walk in. But realistically, people in dense cities just don't have much space for bulk purchases.

I think "1 kilo of food per person per day" is a reasonable approximation (e.g. 1kg of dried beans is 3300 calories, 1kg of canned tuna is 1300 calories). 400 kilos of food should be enough to last a family of 4 for 3 months. Efficiently packed, you can fit 400kg of food in a 0.5m x 1m x 1m space (1 large kitchen cabinet).

It's a fair bit of space, but it's not a "fill your bedroom with stuff" amount of space.

The problem with efficiently packing that is you won't have access to it easily, in order to rotate stock.

If you are not careful you'll end up with spoiled food when you need it.

Plus there's a lot more to stock than just food - It's not just about disaster preparation, we're also trying to save money and packaging and resources.

I know this subthread is talking about saving money, but imo that shouldn't be the first priority. The first priority is avoiding disaster. Insurance costs money up front. The "cost" you are insuring against is being without food after a hurricane/blizzard/etc. If you can ALSO save money up front, that's great.

I live in a downtown highrise, have a car. It works with a shelf for added storage which takes up 5 or 6 sq ft. Having the space for, say, a chest freezer, would up my game a lot but I can do plenty of bulk purchases with what I have.

The lack of space is annoying though still.

If you live in a dense city, you may be better served by getting a commercial "emergency food supply" product. A 2-week food supply from one of the major suppliers of such products is about $125 and fits in 2 5-gallon buckets. Alternatively, you can get similar foods that come in #10 cans, they store nicely under a bed.

I use these products for backpacking and they will obviously never match a real home-cooked meal but they are decent in a pinch.

That covers you for food (you will need water), and just expanding your paper goods slightly should be plenty. You're not trying to become a "prepper", you just want to get through a bad week.

I always figured the cost of the additional square footage in a home per property tax etc was part of the equation. There's some cost for additional size usually. But if you're already paying that cost better to get some use out of it in the form of bulk storage for sure. I suppose there's a freedom to store in having that space. I like the time saving angle, I was looking at old receipts last month and am always stunned by the slice of life they capture. I had transactions where I'd go buy filtered water. Since buying a RO device I never had to haul water any longer. Such a different time of life, definitely saving time there.

I was right there with you. Dealing with the deliberately obfuscated price/sizes of TP/PT bothers me, so my life is much improved if I only do it ~once per year. And paper products are exactly the type of thing you can easily put on the top shelf of a closet and stack to the ceiling.

You're responding to a concern about society with a suggestion for individuals. It may be good advice for individuals, but do you think most people are going to follow it?

Great response - even if I can buy a pig with bullets it doesn't help anything else. That assumes you can butcher and store the meat. This seems like a kind of bikeshedding argument - the bike shed is built so don't worry about the actual nuclear reactor, you can always just hide in the bike shed. Doesn't matter how well built the bike shed is - you're still surrounded by nuclear fallout

I've been saying this for a long time: https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/

Cash isn't illegal yet. Use it.

Don't use any one system exclusively. Even if you rely wholly on your normal person checking account and electronic payments, have a few grand stashed away in your house in cash. Sometimes the lights go out, and ATMs with them.

hey, this is pretty neat to see a word count summary up front

> ( 2341 words, approximately 13 minutes reading time. )

I'd love to see that in every article and perhaps have some css setting that I could globally twiddle for every website so folks could opt in or out as they please. I suppose an extension could possibly tackle it too if the semantics are correct on the page.

Firefox reader view gives a reading time estimate.

In the event that you are trading gold and silver and ammo, your first problem will be holding onto your gold and ammo in the first place. Which means if you are prepping for this scenario, your first order of business is to be part of a tribe willing and able to defend you.

This is why I believe leadership in urban environments would quickly turn over to existing city gangs in a collapse scenario. Maybe the police would be one gang that controls a fraction of the city.

Urban gangs already have the required tribal associations, intimate understanding of the terrain and resources therein, and the propensity to commit violence that would be required to take control.

Any of us good citizens who keep our heads down, go to work, avoid violence at all costs, and individually prep for a collapse without building existing association to a coherent tribe will end up quickly dead or subservient to these existing tribes.

The question is, in total societal collapse situation do you want to live? I am not sure I would want to.

I'd just want to stick around to see how things panned out, it'd be pretty interesting.

If we're in a situation where society devolves to the point where people have to trade whisky or ammo for a pig to eat then half of us are going to end up murdered for anything valuable to begin with.

If it gets to that point we're (or at least a non-trivial fraction of us) gonna end up murdered not because people want what we have but because by the time things fall apart like that people will hate us and want us dead.

French revolution, Russian revolution, Europe's religious wars during/after the reformation, etc, the professional classes of people who built and maintained "the system" don't tend to do to well at the hands of everyone else when it finally keels over.

A month or so of salary in cash at home, and some "hard assets" is a good hedge.

Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed?

You're not going to lose access to your bank account because the bank failed; the FDIC handles that. It just moves to a different bank over the weekend.

Locked out because Chexsystems thinks you're a financial criminal is more in the direction of possible.

I've had banks go technologically tits up and render my funds inaccessible for multiple days in the past. Card payments fucked, etc.

Has happened to more than one bank I've used, in more than one country.

I've also had a bank freeze my account temporarily (for over a week) because some risk algorithm somewhere thought fraud was occurring.

All those times, having a bunch of cash handy was very useful.

As for hard assets: they make a decent hedge against financial shithousery.

> Under what situation could that possibly be useful where all society hasn't collapsed?

In a natural disaster type situation it could easily be the difference between being able to get what you need stay put the whole time or running out of some supply you didn't think you'd need and having to evacuate half way through the follow-on mess and losing quite a bit to looters and/or the environment.

The other person who replied mentioned more mundane stuff.

As some other replies have said - the best and most reasonable hedge is to rely on your community and have good bonds there. Doesn't matter how much cash you have if people don't care about that anymore, the best option is to have social bonds and have a community to support you, no person is an island etc

$100 under your mattress for the future is not worth nearly as much as giving that money to a friend to help them cover rent today

Slaughtering a pig isn't some trivial process, it requires skill and equipment that most people lack. But even if it was doable and a person trades their emergency gold for a couple weeks of food, then what? Any disaster that reduces society to pig bartering isn't likely to be fixed in a short amount of time.

Bitcoin fixes this

By putting the onus on the user to maintain access and security rather than the bank?

By making the loss irreversible.

Yes, rather than a bank that loses zelle transfers.

I have five people in my household. Only one of them, not myself, doesn’t regularly loose important stuff. We are super adept at key replacement, Drivers License replacement, passport replacement, debit card replacement, etc. I travel with two phones, two laptops, and two kindles.

At this point if I haven’t lost my debit card in six months, I will just report it lost to change the numbers.

I have worked at financial institutions; while they are not infallible, they are all better at this stuff than my family, and usually work in teams for important stuff.

Zelle transfers into an institutionally insured checking/savings account at a major financial institution are pretty safe and people will get their money back. Zelle transfers from non-BoA accounts will have the records at the other banks to prove the transfers existed and they can be recovered that way. If BoA really lost the records and don't have backups and people lost transfers from BoA to BoA accounts and neither BoA account has a record of the transaction, it will just be a hassle for customers probably having to fill out some forms and wait a while.

I trust my ability to keep a small file (or more realistically: 24 random words that can be committed to memory with some effort) secure more than I trust any corporate entity that treats the penalties for screwing their customers as a mere cost of doing business.

Crypto has many failure cases but a generalized loss of all transfers for all wallets is simply not one of them.

This isn't a defense of the corporate banking structure.

The cognitive load necessary to grok crypto currencies doesn't displace that which is required to utilize existing financial solutions, it's just adds to it. It's also less forgiving and has fewer safe guards or regulations.

For most people, crypto is just an added layer of obfuscation and complexity with some speculative gambling sprinkled on top. It benefits few and only when utilized by many.

It's like cash, if cash were a bar of wet soap you had to hold onto while riding a roller coaster in the rain.

To grok something and to utilize something are two entirely different levels of understanding and it is not honest to conflate the two; most people don't grok the existing financial infrastructures either.

Grok was the wrong word then. I wasn't conflating the two but rather emphasizing that the amount of cognitive load needed to utilizing crypto in our society is far higher than what's needed to use a cash, bank card, or even credit.

I disagree. At least from the standpoint of the average end-user; sending or receiving a payment with a mainstream cryptocurrency is not meaningfully more difficult than doing that with something like PayPal or Cashapp. Different, but not more difficult.

And this is with a wallet where you control your own keys. If you use a centralized site like Coinbase then is basically indistinguishable from something like those other apps.

Crypto isn't terribly hard, depending on the exact context you have in mind when you say 'crypto'. It boils down to keeping your key safe and accessible, or in the custody of someone who can keep your keys safe and accessible.

You can literally stamp your keys into some steel plate, bolt them somewhere safe in your house, and forget about them for 30 years. You use a hardware wallet for your day-to-day and a separate hardware wallet for your savings account and transfer between as needed.

It's not for everyone, but it isn't hard - it's just new context.

> Crypto isn't terribly hard

... for you. That's the key.

After the Thanksgiving holiday over the course of 2 weeks, I fabricated and installed individually addressable permanent LED holiday lights on my three story house and built out a control box for less than $1000. It wasn't hard... for me.

You likely already posses a great deal of knowledge necessary to leverage crypto that a lot of people don't. It's not hard... for you.

That's not an argument that makes much sense to me, because we do things every day that require a great deal of context and training. At some point someone taught us how to operate a steel missile that burns hydrocarbons to propel us onto a road network where we need to be able to interpret symbols, colors, and complex pre-arranged maneuvers in order to allow us to negotiate this system and not die. That took maybe a few weeks to figure out.

Crypto is not hard, it's in fact quite simple. It's just a matter of training people on a couple of simple rules. You don't need any pre-existing skills, you don't need any expensive equipment, you just need to be motivated to spend a few hours learning a new thing.

Does this work for your average hospitality worker, or is it really only a solution for the techno elite?

In every institution I’ve worked at if you do something that accumulates fines you and your management get fired. Since it’s a small street, you also effectively get blacklisted. They’re also highly influenced by their credit rating and credit spreads for day to day operational financing, which negative reputational events directly impact. Boards are also really unhappy with these situations and C level folks are often fired. I think you understate the consequences, even if the bank itself can afford to pay the fines.

And yet gargantuan financial institutions keep getting fined for various kinds of misbehavior, on a what seems to be a regular basis. The one that sticks out in my mind aside from this kind of failure was the systematic fraud perpetuated by Wells Fargo. Are any execs in prison or was it just financial fines (i.e. cost of doing business) and job losses for the lower level peons who executed the (plausibly deniable) orders?

You will have to forgive me for being entirely unsatisfied with that level of accountability.

Re: ease of use, I think crypto skeptics tend to intentionally overstate the knowledge and skill required. We're not exactly at the "grandparent safe" level yet, but framing it as something only for the "techno-elite" isn't fair either.

By aligning the interests of the custodian and beneficiary.

Money loss of this kind does not happen because the interest of the custodian is misaligned. The bank does not make a profit if your money goes missing.

Technical errors can happen regardless of what the custodian wants

No, it doesn't. They can go missing, too.

https://www.businessinsider.com/james-howells-threw-away-bit...

> James Howells is known as the man who accidentally threw away 8,000 bitcoins. Now he has an $11 million master plan to get them back.

Bitcoin has a transaction throughput of 1 KB/s (less than a 28.8 modem) for the entire world.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc.html#1y

Stop using facts, math, information theory, and other malarkey when discussing crypto. They are all clearly not important to the goal of pumping and dumping. Thanks.

It's curious to me that this is downvoted, I am practically a crypto evangelist and have been since the beginning but even I acknowledge that the BTC network's capacity is extremely, extremely low. It's not suitable as a world-wide transaction engine, not even for relatively infrequent transaction types like store of value accounts that don't move around. There have been some half-hearted attempts to fix this (lightning network for example) but nothing that actually provides substantial throughput. Bitcoin Cash was an attempt to improve it incrementally but that was pretty solidly rejected by the community (and wouldn't have really solved the problem anyhow)

I think it's fair to say BTC has a capacity problem, and it's not just a technical one - it's also a cultural aversion to change in the base protocol and cultural aversion to extension of the base protocol to allow additional abstraction layers that could solve the problem.

In what way does Lightning not solve the problem?

How does it solve the problem in any way?

If we take a step back, we should also realize that no other cryptocurrency has this problem. You just let the throughput be higher and it works, because 1 KB/s is completely absurd in 2023.

Any transaction still has to make it on to the chain. A side chain would be like us playing catch in the back yard and thinking we will somehow be padding our major league baseball stats. It doesn't matter until something happens where it counts.

If you find someone to play catch with, that's great, but the whole point of a global transaction network is that anyone can send a balance to anyone else.

Lightning has a fundamental graph theory / routing problem. As the number of nodes increase the path between those nodes grows at a nonlinear rate. The internet has this problem too, which it mainly solves by letting a human put a finger on the scale in a centralized fashion. Lightning network cannot make this tradeoff. It's a simple mathematical problem that we've known about for centuries and it's baffling that anyone thought it would help in the first place.

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