Investing in a bank is a high risk activity. Like buying PayPal stock.
But merely depositing in a bank is *supposed* to be a low risk activity. Like using PayPal.
Now, there is a school of thought that says that this isn’t the case.
That any money you have in the fiat banking system is subject to seizing and freezing.
That you are taking principal risk whenever you don’t have private keys.
That the Fed’s practice of printing and then hiking and then printing some more has destabilized the entire economy.
That you should only invest in the USD what you expect to lose.
But if you start taking those concepts to their logical conclusion, they don’t lead you back to “full faith and trust in the US government.”
If you really need to get full control over the lowest level of the financial stack — if you need to treat your bank account as having counterparty risk, if you need to do due diligence on your entire financial system — well, that is the line of thinking that gets you to Bitcoin and defi.
For those who are unaware: the FDIC is brutally efficient, vastly more than almost any other government agency I can name. On Monday morning, the former Silicon Valley Bank branches will re-open under the name of another bank.