Market Discussions

I just remembered one other thing that I had been wondering earlier in regards to the main topic of the feasibility of a bank in EVE. How difficult is it from a management perspective to actually run a bank that gets tens to hundreds of billions in deposits, assuming a minimum deposit of one billion (or other numbers depending on player's knowledge)? How many different people are really required to run an operation of that size? And how much time do they have to spend managing their specific aspect of the bank? It seems like this management question is very pertinent to the overall discussion topic.

First of all, we have no evidence that Phaser took in anywhere near as much ISK as he claimed, and second, IIRC the dude who ran it made a point of avoiding any forum, where he would have instantly been called out. I'm not aware of any major investors who were taken by Phaser for any significant amount, surely not billions of ISK. Same as the latest similar scam, 'Berkshire & Strawman' or whatever.

The distinction is one of affirmation; while anyone can start a 'bank' and convince people to deposit ISK, especially by spamming local in eve where the vast, vast majority aren't even aware of MD, that's a very far cry from saying "yes, people who are informed of the history of banks in EVE will invest in a new one because they trust in the idea."

This is literally incoherent.

You are now discussing why automation is better than audits when scamming.

You have lost your mind in this thread, internet meltdown style.

I appreciate how hard you're trying.

I had just assumed it was fairly well understood, but now that I think about it, it really hasn't been discussed very often at all.

So basically you have a batch job setup on an hourly basis to query the deposit corporation API for player transfers and credit new deposits to the appropriate account. No button pushing, just a background service doing an API query on the hour every hour. It takes some work to build it but the benefit is that the whole thing runs like clockwork and you can even tell the user when the next deposit check is.

The interest payments worked the same way, but on a daily basis. Whatever you had in your account at the end of the day had a small amount of interest credited to it....each and every day without fail. I think people liked that. They could log in every day and every day they had a little bit more in their account balance than the day before - it's a psychological thing I think.

Absolutely, but unless you're writing everything to two separate databases or making full backups every 5 minutes and retaining all of them....it's possible. You manage the risk by restricting who has direct access to the database. During EBANK's run, no more than two people had access to the database at any given time.



They would go to a withdraw page or see a withdraw option by their account summary, simply type in the amount to withdraw and designate the character it be routed to and then submit. If the amount is valid it goes to the withdraw queue and if it's not, an error message would display. Easy as pie (for the customer).

I said it way earlier in the post and I will say it again. Until there is some mechanism to clawback loan losses, there is no point to develop a banking system. I.E. until the bank can recover assets that it loans out through some method of foreclosure and loans are based solely on trust, there is no real incentive to loan or receive a loan.

Just my two cents.

Past records shown that the guy doing that, contextually sucked money off. You can restore a database as much as you want but it won't magically return the missing billions in the bank.

This is one aspect of the tech risk I alluded to earlier in the thread. Banks require this sort of system but history strongly suggests that eve players aren't good enough/reliable enough at programming to pull off the task. DBANK failed precisely because of a database problem and the subsequent decision of the boss that the workload involved in recovering was too high. So he kept all the cash. EBANK found out that (one of?) their programmer had been manipulating the database to siphon funds into his own account. With a bank you have very low returns due to the size and structure of the business model but considerable additional risks, such as this tech risk, over a smaller business. Any sensible investor would want greater security for a lower return but banks offer the worst of both worlds.

Btw, stop being mean to Darth. Consistency isn't his strong suit as it can play merry hell with the flow of his rhetoric. Clearly one or the other has to be sacrificed.

@Hexxx and Jake - I have very grave worries about any business model that starts from the premise that it is only workable if it targets the ignorant and exploits the stupid. If you can only get over the very high risk/ very low return issue by targetting people that don't understand how to carry out a basic risk assessment then you start from a position whereby you implicitly represent the security of the investment as something other than it is. Bankers willing to go down that dishonest road just so they can have a bank to play with are precisely the kind of bankers that led to all the previous problems with banks.

One of the very important points in talking about risk management is the difference between possible and probable. Right now, today, as we speak, it is possible that your Bank in RL could experience fraud. Collusion is all it takes. It could be caught eventually, but not right away. However, this has a very very low probability. Not being dismissive of your point, I just wanted to touch on that. In EBANK's case, the database fraud was not financially significant (that is to say, not a significant amount when compared to the total finances). That doesn't mean it's ok, it simply means that the amount wasn't terribly damaging to the overall finances.




I believe that was a bit of facetiousness on my part at least. EBANK started with MD first and continued to get customers from MD, but I'm not sure that MD has 6,000 active participants. I would also suggest that people outside of MD are not ignorant and stupid. I am VERY interested however in presenting a realistic picture of risk to customers and investors.

We MUST do better in this regard. I cited some of the past losses as part of this effort to be transparent. This is less about "All Banks are scams" and more about "Total Bank losses over a 5 year period equal 4.4 Trillion".