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Comment by eljojo | Hacker News Reader

do you store stuff in a bank? could you tell me more about it? my account gives me access to one for free and been meaning to put a yubikey there for a while but never have

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I do. I have a small safe deposit box in my local branch for about $1 a year.

It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure. Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss of the deposit box at around $1000.

So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like they do in movies.

There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-value items, but they are pretty exotic.

that's... a really good perspective to have, thanks for sharing!

Safe deposit boxes are not safe. There are many stories of peoples stuff going missing.

ex: https://www.cbc.ca/news/safety-deposit-box-protection-1.7338...

https://archive.is/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-...

Maybe not safe for valuables. What about stuff that has no value to anyone else? I'm not a villain from Ocean's Eleven, no one is stealing my passwords to break into my elaborate safe.

What I found out when I was burgled, was that they don't care. I had nothing valuable in my firesafe but they still took it wholesale. I found some papers from it drifting around outside afterwards like they had dumped it out. But not my passport or SSN card. The lock was even broken so they could have just opened it to see that and saved themselves the lift. But again, they don't care.

What if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a particular bank would be able to get your password, but also if one or two go missing, the password won't be lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a year to make sure everything is good.

Better do Shamir's Secret Sharing instead, set threshold to 2/4, and regenerate all parts if any part goes missing.

My (large) bank is yanking their safety deposit boxes out. They let subscribers know that they have, like, 1 or 2 years to go. They're doing it across the branches. They basically feel it's not worth the liability any more, and the way it was presented to me, it's not just them, but other banks are also doing (or at least considering) this.

Things we take for granted. When my father passed, I was digging stuff out of SDBs that he had for decades.

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