[dylan604]

This isn't that ironic, as there are often safe deposit boxes with contents more valuable than the cash on hand of the bank branch itself.

Yes, ironic that digital currency is being protected by physical bank, but that's really stretching for something to be haha. It's SOP for banks really.

[kkielhofner]

I was more referring to the (somewhat fair) crusade against big banks in the crypto community in general. Tweeting against banks all day and talking about "code is law" while paying a safe deposit box fee and leaning on the traditional legal system (wills, etc) and banks (the box) scales somewhere from ironic to hypocritical.

[mananaysiempre]

No it doesn’t, at least in a sensible understanding of the crusade. (I’m not sure cryptographic Byzantine consensus is the panacea it is touted to be, but agree with its proponents as to whether many of the things they call problems with the traditional system are in fact problems.) It’s nice to have a technical solution to things that do not actually need human interpretation, and it’s nice to expand the set of these things. Whether you actually want human interpretation for the act of transferring money is questionable.

Fiat money is uniquely susceptible to repressive governments in a way that nothing was when people actually thought about countering those in a practical way, and bank transfers are even more so—see today’s news from Canada for an example that’s chilling whether or not you agree with the actual politics in play. That needs to be fixed, I think. It could be fixed by making money more resilient to government intervention or by making governments less likely to make malicious interventions, probably both. These approaches, and even approaches to these approaches, have different implications, so history will have to find the balance, but I’d be loath to just dismiss the former out of hand.

But death is a thing that needs human interpretation, at least for the foreseeable future, and thus those arguments don’t apply here. The current banking and actuarial system isn’t that insane for the most part, for a system that has to operate under the constraint of needing human interpretation. It’s just that I refuse to stop thinking about the extent to which such a constraint is actually present in any particular situation. In strongbox rental, it is. Great! And I say that as someone with an experience of withdrawing the contents of a safe deposit box from a branch of a failing bank, on the day before the doors of said branch were locked and tagged.

(Nothing about a strongbox rental business even needs to be connected with loans or securities in any way, it’s just that banks sort of organically grew both functions. No problem with that, but also no problem with somebody dissatisfied with any aspect of modern macroeconomics having no gripes against safe deposit boxes.)

[MichaelZuo]

I think the parent was pointing out at the irony that every hour of effort spent on the crypto space so far has only made banks and other institutions even more critical in the end, because the death rate will be 100% for the forseeable future, like it always has been.

It’s effectively backloading risk onto the very things claimed to be outmoded and replaceable.

[matheusmoreira]

Not ironic at all. It's a fact that banks have great physical security, no reason to not take advantage of that. If you have a cryptocurrency paper wallet in the bank, they don't know about it, it's not on their books, they can't lend it out without your knowledge and inflate the economy with it.