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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 w

• tmpz22 4y ago
  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.
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  • astrange 4y ago
    > 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.
• notch656c 4y ago
  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.
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > 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.
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    • tristor 4y ago
      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.
      • shuckles 4y ago
        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-statistics/ https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist...
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      • pkaye 4y ago
        Why does Texas has so many reported burglaries though? https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-reported-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232539/burglaries-report...
• zaphod420 4y ago
  Bitcoin fixes this
  • cptskippy 4y ago
    By putting the onus on the user to maintain access and security rather than the bank?
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      By making the loss irreversible.
    • toomim 4y ago
      Yes, rather than a bank that loses zelle transfers.
      • lanstin 4y ago
        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.
      • krferriter 4y ago
        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.
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• webdoodle 4y ago
  Sounds like Blade Runner 2049 is predictive programming.
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > 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.
  • notch656c 4y ago
    It happened in Argentina. One day people woke up and their USD access basically gone.
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > 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.
      • notch656c 4y ago
        >very little unrest ... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/20/argentina2 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.
        • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
          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.)
• luckylion 4y ago
  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.
  • aeturnum 4y ago
    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-sanctuary-policies-on-crime-and-the-economy/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-effects-of-sanc... [2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22610 https://www.nber.org/papers/w22610 [3] https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/101/2/310/58516/SNAP-Benefits-and-Crime-Evidence-from-Changing?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/101/2/310/58516...
    • jlawson 4y ago
      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.
• closeparen 4y ago
  This is literally the plot of Mr. Robot.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Having worked in many banks ledger systems are extraordinarily redundant. This won’t happen, even in a fight club scenario.
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  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.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    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$.
  • anonporridge 4y ago
    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.
• __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  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.
• browningstreet 4y ago
  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.
  • jen20 4y ago
    > 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!
  • xattt 4y ago
    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.
    • idontpost 4y ago
      [dead]
    • Loughla 4y ago
      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?
      • xattt 4y ago
        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.
• Justsignedup 4y ago
  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.
• satvikpendem 4y ago
  Have you seen Mr Robot? Something similar happens in the show, good watching for anyone on HN.
• e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  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
• mistrial9 4y ago
  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.
• phpisthebest 4y ago
  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.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I get your point but I trust 1970s tech a bit more than modern tech.
• baby 4y ago
  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.