Ah, nice (terrifying?) to see this shit happening over in fiatland.
Nobody thinks about the enormous amount of faith we put into the invisible infrastructure that continuously tracks and documents our financial accounts, until that one day when things go very wrong.
Not true; Bitcoiners do all day long.
For Ms. Gruntmane, a 35-year-old physician assistant, that moment came on the Friday morning before Easter, as she was getting ready to take her daughter to school. Fidelity Investments sent messages alerting her that her phone number and email address had been removed from her profile — and to contact Fidelity if she hadn’t done it.
"Alarmed, she quickly logged in, “only to find that all of my accounts had disappeared and my balance showed zero dollars.”""Alarmed, she quickly logged in, “only to find that all of my accounts had disappeared and my balance showed zero dollars.”"
One of us, one of us...
...Fidelity had eliminated all traces of her longstanding financial relationship with it, erasing the tens of thousands of dollars she held in three accounts, including the Roth individual retirement account that her father had set up for her when she was 16 — and where she had made regular contributions ever since.
Fidelity said it could not share specifics related to Ms. Gruntmane’s experience, out of concerns for privacy and account safety. The company declined to say how often these kinds of snafus arise, or why customer reps had no insight into this issue. The firm told Ms. Gruntmane that her money hadn’t gone anywhere; it just wasn’t visible to her on the mobile app or the website.
Look, in a permissioned, trusted, database-is-money system, if nobody can see your balance, you don't have it.
Tradfi laughs these things off like "oh, of course she got her money back, just a glitch" but I'm curious who and how many people need to be able to see a balance for it to exist.
Clearly, it's not just a screenshot (I can make a screenshot showing that I have all kinds of money). But it's also like we assume that if I had a paper or a screenshot or something they'd e able to reassemble my account from all the various transactions that have happened in the past. And I suspect that this is true: our financial system is such a complicated web that having an account actually get accidentally deleted is quite hard. So, while it's exciting, it's problem not the thing to worry about.
Bigger is that pretty much everyone in a developed nation must beg for permission to use their money and I don't think we've even begun to see how draconian the controls will be.
let's go 100% digital and cashless, fuck yeah!
what's this "cash" you speak of? Never seen
exactly