How long do you suppose the financial business which is your bank would stay open after it got destroyed by a hack, AI, etc.?
There is no FDIC equivalent which will ensure your access to a safe deposit box inside a vault inside a defunct bank.
This is the real answer:
You are working yourself towards old crazy guy shouting at clouds. Better to not do that.
Safe deposit box. Safe. The big vault-lookin’ thing. The box is deposited in the safe. It’s a safe deposit box.
What exactly are you going to keep in a safe deposit box? Piles of cash? After AI collapses the global financial system, will those pieces of paper be worth anything? (See Germany 1923, Brazil 1985-94, etc.) Gold? It’s just some shiny metal and worth only what the financial system says it’s worth. Unless you have a very large safe deposit box filled with nonperishable food, there’s no guarantee that its contents will be any use to you.
A related question was brought up in the “What if I win the Lottery?” thread. You can open a Treasury Direct account for free, and it has every permutation and combination of dollar related equivalent securities from essentially overnight certificates of deposit to 30 year bonds and everything in between in varying maturities. You can keep your money on deposit there and move it to an ordinary bank account at any time, if you wish. It the United States Treasury goes Tango Uniform, you’ve got other problems to worry about.
I don’t think things are fine even if Vanguard is the only thing taken over.
Not just too expensive. I believe that the AI race will ultimately reveal itself to be an unprofitable bubble and the heads of these firms are seeking an exit or soft landing before it bursts. But that’s IMHO.
I’m curious how you think that might happen? Like some sort of shape-shifting Terminators infiltrate Vanguard and replace the CEO and board of directors?
Do you envision large corporations have some sort of admin account that can be hacked and now all of a sudden, some bad actor can drive the company?
From my experience, forget AI. If your bank were to fail at all, it will likely fail it some way that you never expected and probably don’t understand. Look at the collapse of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and Silicon Valley Bank.
As I said just above your post: once that bank is out of business, who unlocks the building & opens the vault for you to get to your box? And who sticks the bank’s key into the usual dual-lock arrangement?
I recommend putting all your money in old comic books.
Beanie Babies. At least until you have enough to buy a Van Gogh.
Bank computer systems have security 5 ways from Sunday. Or 10. The other key, which every system should have, is safe backups. The ransomware scenario is “we have scrambled your data and you cannot get it back unless…” If something should get in and crash the system then the company would shut it all down, and try to rebuild and they have the “before” data. (Of course, lots of other possibilities, like a slow virus that corrupts the backups for while before triggering) The most expensive part is to ensure that they don’t just set it all back up with the same vulnerability for the virus to get in again.
Recall the fellow (Stanley Mark Rifkin) back in the good old days who worked on the inter-bank transfer protocol, and managed to send himself $10M. He took it and bought diamonds from the Russians. It didn’t take long to figure it out. Apparently the bank made a profit with the diamonds he got.
The usual technique is to ensure NOBODY has enough authority to do everything. This is standard accounting practice. So presumably if one role in the bank is hacked, it would (we hope) be noticed but the hacker/AI agent would be limited in what they could do. You can create accounts, but not move money, etc. Limits on dollar amounts, the number such transactions, geographic limitations, requiring supervisor sign-off etc.