Market Discussions

If I am not mistaken, Jake was referring to the characters that operate the bank.

To bring an older part of the thread back into here, this is something that the Clearing house could possibly provide, being that third party.

"everyone's deposit or withdrawal" ?

I was referring to the API of the bank characters that handled deposits and withdrawals. If that information was made public, it would also show the name of the depositors alongside their deposits.




I was not commenting on whether or not the men and women in government are competent enough to control the amount of Treasury Bonds that are created. I was merely describing that the actual system of debt-based currency (and fiat currency) was not necessarily going to lead to an uncontrollable debt death spiral. The exponential increase in debt can actually be perfectly fine for all of human history if production of goods continues alongside it. The system itself is completely neutral, and is itself neither necessarily bad or good. We are in complete agreement: the question on what will ultimately happen is a question of whether the players in question have the competence to run the system.

Ah good, Sub-thread back back to Eve :)

The "check book money", IBNs, can not be exapanded beyond what it represents, the ISK. That assumes the role of the House is there.

I suppose one of the member banks could expand its own private IBN balance, making IBN loans within it's own operations, but to transfer that IBN back through the House would incur an ISK debt upon the member bank.

Interesting.

I would suspect it would have to do with the new "saving draft" feature".

Ie. you get to quote the whole thing (the draft) even if it hasn't been posted yet.

Just a guess.

Don't forget Thomas and Popper citations plus the unavoidable Soros mention!

problem with NPC banks is they will either
A give interest, thus being an isk faucet
B give no interest and be worthless
C give something ( loyalty points or something) and become a huge advantage for rich folk to just farm the stuff..

DISCLAIMER: I won't pretend to have read all posts in this thread - by no means - so I will probably repeat stuff said by others.

Having said that, the biggest problem in EVE banking would be the inability to 'hurt' people. In RL, a loan, bank account, credit card contract, bond etc is a legally binding document. When one party breaks the contract, this party can (and will) be punished in some way. Even in case of bankruptcy, the assets are sold and all revenues go to the creditors (details ofc differ per jurisdiction). As there is no such thing as a legal entity in EVE - safe for CONCORD, which only deals with killings - no one will have to face the consequences for breaking a (loan) contract.

One can just run away with any loan, and the bank will never see its money again. On the other hand, I'd dare to say the absence of a banking industry stifles economic growth (for as far as that can be measured in EVE), as everyone is just holding on to their money; few will dare to spend 90% of their capital on an investment that only yields several % profits. In these cases, having a loan by a bank will lower the 'barrier' to spending money

Some here have mentioned NPC banks. This doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. While NPC banks would probably indeed be trusted, an NPC bank is by definition somewhat of a robot. How can a robot determine what the risks are corporation X will (not) pay back its loans? No way it can. While several NPC banks already exist in name (e.g. Bank of Luminaire, Caldari Funds Unlimited), the only role I could imagine for an NPC bank would be a 'bank of last resort', i.e. a central bank where player-run banks could temporarily borrow money from in case of a bankrun or something similar. This would clash with the story-line tho, at least in the case of Caldari.

Though, in the end, relatively safe loans are already possible with the current game mechanics. While they are not meant for loans, you can simply use the courier contract system as an impromptu loan system. (e.g. the borrower makes the contract, say for one jump in Hisec. When the lender accepts the contract, the collateral becomes the loan. The borrower and lender then agree that the lender delivers the package - that contains something negligible - in say 2 weeks time. The package is delivered, the collateral/loan is transferred back to the lender and the reward functions as the interest rate).

That is true. Just 2 weeks is not very long. On the other hand this also gives some more trust by giving a series of small incremental loans. In that way, the lender would at least partially get back his/her money in a short time span. Besides, everything in EVE goes faster than in RL anyway; no one is gonna buy a 20-year bond as is possible in RL. We don't even know if EVE still exists in 20 years from now!

If the bank could gather a core 50-100B (not so hard these days) then it's possible to secure up to 243 simultaneous transactions per banker account in a way to give a ceiling of say 20% max loss (may be decided in advance) per bank customer in case of full bank default / scam. That would require some more tellering work though.