Bitcoin Forum

The day has come: Banks can’t ignore Bitcoin anymore. Not even the biggest of the big.

First up is Citigroup, the New York City-based global banking giant recently revealed to the International Business Times that it is developing its own version of Bitcoin. Predictably branded ‘Citicoin,’ the virtual currency was coded by Citigroup’s research and design arm, Citi Innovation. Still in the early testing phase, a patent has not been filed for the mainly open-source cryptocurrency, which is based off of Bitcoin and its core blockchain ledger technology, a chronological public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions that have ever taken place. This approach will allow for less complicated and less costly cross-border payments and other transactions.   

Citigroup, which has eyed distributed ledger tech over “the last few years,” also admitted to the Times that it has developed three internal blockchains to test its fledgling digital coins on.

While the company’s inaugural foray into virtual currency is promising -- and certainly a pioneering move within the traditional financial services industry -- it’s still a ways away from being the real deal.

“They [Citigroup’s blockchains] are all within the labs just now, so there is no real money passing through these systems yet,” Ken Moore, head of Citi Innovation Labs, told the Times. “They are at a pre-production level, to be clear.”

So far, the focus of Citigroup’s digital currency system has been on cross-border payments, with trade likely up next, Moore said.

He described Citicoin, as “an equivalent to Bitcoin,” and said it’s “up and running” within company labs in an effort to give Citigroup a head start. “It’s in the labs, but it’s to make sure we are at the leading edge of this technology and that we can exploit the opportunities within it.”

Citigroup has thrown down the virtual gauntlet. Which big bank is up next?


http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248125

Now this is interesting.  I would never think a bank would do this.  They make too much from wire transfers and other things.  I wonder what their angle is?  Maybe there will be something shady about the coin, like a pre mine or something.  But the god thing is that they have lots of customers, and if those customers are exposed to a crypto, then we have more people using cryptos overnight.  This will be good for us I think, and bitcoin will grow in to the monster we all know it is.

I don't think bitcoin or the banking world would be real excited about it, as its just another altcoin. However since its a bank and has customers might be the reason it might become big. I don't really see the advantage of having a centralized currency accepted by the people, and this is probably just going to be only for one bank.

Their intention is just to move money fast overseas in a private network owned by the bank, it is no competition to bitcoin. It is just the blockchain tech being used to make the current banking system more efficient.

To me... the blockchain innovation is an almost certain winner..

The doubts imo is not about the blockchain, but whether bitcoin or some other use of the same innovation will be the winner - because as the Winklevos twins said recently.. "it's probably a winner takes all market". Just like Facebook, Google etc.. when the dust settles there is likely one clear winner.

So now the question is... will that now be Citicoin rather than bitcoin?

I think that the Bitcoin network is far too big for "shiticoin" to compete with it.

"Citicoin" - what a joke. That sounds like just another altcoin to be used only in cities (someone should create clone-fork it).

Apparently banks don't want to use Bitcoin, because they can't control it. I'm sure this and similar initiatives won't last. They will be outrun by more innovative open-source approaches that run on the Bitcoin blockchain. Banks will come to a painful realization: They can't lead anymore, they'll have to follow (Bitcoin).

The age of traditional banks is coming to an end.

ya.ya.yo!

Stupid and pointless.  If they're going to let us mine it, then it's just another altcoin.  If they're going to run a blockchain with no mining, then it's just their own internal computer system and not a cryptocurrency.  Maybe they're trying to implement it as an automated system so they can fire a few thousand people.

I'm urgently asking all bitcoiners to boycott this altcoin. BTC is quite good, it may evolve, it may even be replaced in the future, but the last thing we want is a cryoptocurrency managed by a bank! What's the point? BTC has been invented to bypass, to ignore banks, we shall refuse any coin which would bring them back at the top of the game.

of course this,  like they even have a choice!

I like the internal computer system idea.  I don't think they seriously want to start an alternate coin.  There have been an increasing number of articles on coindesk about the blockchain technology, it looks like Citi is taking its potential seriously.  I'm not sure this is good for bitcoin though.

Yes, they are making internal blockchains with citicoin running on them. It's an interbank system not open to public. I think their so called citicoin doesn't hold any value, it's just a token to enter smart contracts with citibank. It will be interesting to see how they tackle the problems. It will be so diferent to bitcoin where bitcoin holds the value.

Great discussion so far everyone. I 100% agree with Runpaint here. I find it mildly interesting but no threat to Bitcoin, at all.

Can someone explain "mainly open source" that's referenced in the article?

It doesn't matter how much money they save or how many employees they lay off, they still won't charge smaller fees to their customers. 

Kind of like how the plastic water bottles now use 50% less plastic "to save the environment", but the price is still the same even though they've reduced their material costs by 50%.

Too many people's thinking are limited by how bitcoin works. Citibank is a fiat bank, they do not need a digital coin, they want to use the blockchain in a different way. The open ledger and smart contracts are the features which are useful to large banks.

I think they are using the blockchain as a timestamped, verifable, contract system between global banks. The coin may be minable by the public but they will be useless to us, because we aren't banks.

Citibank coin is not a competitor to bitcoin. I think it is going to raise awareness of the "blockchain" buzzword, more people will be more comfortable using a crypto.

Citibank is premining their own coin and will issue them out as they see fit. Citicoin does not represent the principles that crypto currency represents, there is no way that the project will be successful.

Will City Wok be accepting Citycoin?

https://i.imgur.com/eMU3xMO.jpg

Citibank = ($1,231,154,000,000)

http://www.moneyeconomics.com/top-10-by-total-asset-citibank/

this was my source for  above.


Bitcoin =      ($3,819,228,000) 

 http://www.bitcoincharts.com/

I did 14.358 mill coins x 266 usd



So Citibank has  322x the value  Of BTC


Plain and simple they can crush BTC if they want to, my gut tell me  it could be a very rough time for Crypto Coins  if banks adapt  the tech and attack the coins with a winner take all strategy .

I goes nobody will be interested in this coin.

I really don't get it, this seems stupid. Who is going to mine Citicoin? No one, except for the company CitiBank. So it will be entirely centralized and defeats the whole purpose of trying to mimic the way the blockchain works. How long is it going to take these guys to realize that someone has already tried this, they're called altcoins shitcoins.

Haha but I still think there is more hate than their should be.  Citi has a huge call center where I live.  :)  I wish they called me back after a short interview.  :(  Basically, there is no harm in this.  Just let them do there thing and either it works or doesn't. 

Oh. Yeah. I see it now.

Citicoin and next will be BoAcoin then HSBCcoin ending up with being a bunch of altcoins that no one really cares.

i have heard about banks talking about blockchain technology and using it for their own, but this is very interesting that this financial banking group is actually doing this.

but from what i understood from the article, the technology is just going to create a copy of bitcoin (like an altcoin) and only be used by the bank, since they say the intention is just to move money fast overseas and i think it is only going to be used by the bank. so it is not going to be anything like bitcoin. it looks like they are just trying to make their banking system more efficient.

This will most likely not be a coin that people can actually use, transfer or trade.

What they might be planning to do is to use the block chain tech and Citicoin as a backbone of their money transfer system, so the coin will always remain their internal asset rather than a public currency.

This may make it easy for them to transfer their money across the globe but regular users will hardly notice what's happening behind the curtain.

Well, well... That was one of my predictions in one of the other threads..

Satoshi made it so easy for them to do this.. There are no Copyright or intellectual property rights on the Blockchain technology, since Satoshi is not a round to claim it. All indications are that Satoshi created Bitcoin as a counter for the banks, and now the banks will use this technology to grow even stronger and more powerfull.

The banks have a advantage over Bitcoin, because they can just force this as a service to their already established customer base. Bitcoin has to build from the ground up and fight the shills and the copy cats, to get to the top. 

The world is moving to a cashless economy and Satoshi just made it easier for this to happen.  ???

 

I'm not sure that is an advantage they hold. We Bitcoiners control the largest application of computing power humanity has ever applied. What do the banks have? A big bag of fiat, and the ear of the lawmakers.

If they truly implement a crypto as we know it, how will their blockchain be secured? Have they invented a new approach? Or will there be mining? Or even worse, just a centralized authority writing the ledger? And if mining, how is their network going to stand up to an infiltration of miners from outside their walled garden?

yet they cannot replicate the decentralized nature of Bitcoin, which is the whole point that really differentiate it, every centralized system is not better than bitcoin, no matter the marketcap

what they have right now, it isn't somethign very different than an enhanced fiat, actually it is just that

Many banks (or bank alliances) got their own pocket "westernunions". That may be the case. They may issue those coins in old school way (with guarantee deposits), set up fees as they like and use just blockchain mechanism to run it.

Great, now every bank pulls out its own shitcoin and in the end we end up with so many bank shitcoins that the hole system is useless.

Fucking banks.

it's not so different from what it happened in the altcoin section, they coem late to the party, it will fade away eventually like it was for other altcoin

i doubt they can come up with something truly original and not a shit copy of bitcoin, which is also centralized

this is what i was thinking and it wouldn't be a bad idea..

the bank makes a coin. its not a minable coin, so they have access to them ALL.

how these coins would work is, say you want to send someone money.. you would go on their website and "buy" whatever money value you need..
now since these are based on bitcoin, they would probably work the same way, so you have a wallet. you can store them and send them and do whatever.
the bank would most likely set the base price for these.. altho there might be a market, why not ?

the way i can see the bank making money on this is if they charge a cashing out fee..

Yeah, maybe the idea is that this could lower their costs a lot, and also the costs for the customers while still having the trust (of refunds if something goes wrong etc.) and personal interactions with actual people.

Their take might be that the bitcoin will have to build the user interface....because they have the internal mechanisms (the blockchain) already.

The bank on the other hand, have the user interface already, and are now building the internal mechanisms..

..

That might be their thinking.

I know already what will happen. When one or more of these coins are established then the banks will lobby the governments to forbid the unregulated coins. Reasons might be terrorism, money laundering and so on. Of course they do it in order to gain money.

This happened before with so many things, i don't even want to think about.

I think any coin issued by bankers will fail very badly unless it is for the bank internet use.
Most people who adopt cryptocurrency hate bankers, why would they adopt a coin issued by a bank?

No Bank or Government will ever create a minable coin that is just a fact.
Not only Banks and Governments will create there one non-minable coins.

i believe that once banks and financial institutions will have full control over a blockchain based and mass adopted coin, humans will be doomed as fuck even worst than with capitalism

Plot twist.

Satoshi and his game theory saw this. The banks are now pulling a if you cant beat em join em.

Question,

 is it easier to directly link your citibank account to bitcoin?

Or

Directly trade your bitcoin for an altcoin called citicoin?

This move could be a very very good thing for bitcoin

CitiCoin sounds too close to ShittyCoin for this to be serious ;) hehe

As much as us bitcoin/crypto supporters would like to say no one will use the coin for the shear fact it's been released by a bank you'd be lying if you did. 

Yeah... that will not be the reason it fails.. if it does.

This news got me thinking and more into Bitcoin.. There are some great things to be done. Citicoin isn't really a bad thing, it was very logical event. Great to see that the landscape is truly changing!!

Sadly that is like an Amazonean tribe saying "medicine A taken from our sacred plants by white people will never work. Everyone who uses the plant hate white people".

Yeah, well - the end game for any bank will not be the current small bank-hating crypto crowd... it will be the average population. If none of us in here uses it will not trouble them in the slightest.  

The way this paragraph reads, it'll act like Ripple. In fact, they prolly got the underlying idea/use case from hearing about Ripple.

Well, that's hardly "it's own version of Bitcoin", now, innit?

no bank is going to make and use a coin long term for the public.
why would they ?
think about it.. they already have infinite methods of transferring money that is cheap (compared to starting a coin)
I can send money from any bank to any bank by just asking them to do it.
I can also use stuff such as western union, money orders or interact eChecks etc.

so tell me what could a coin possibly do that they can't already and have done for 50 years ?
and the cost / security factor of setting up and maintaining a coin is another issue.

Cut out the expensive middleman, and let them trade with each other directly. Yes, banks have middlemen too - the clearing houses.

ever used interact eTransfer ?
I have lots and it can't cost them that much to setup..
I used it with Localbitcoins to set up deals selling Bitcoin many times and got paid instantly.

I really don't see how any large bank has a need for crypto coins.

I've never used interact eTransfer. Never even heard of it. Do banks routinely use it to move $trillions daily?

Perhaps you've not yet read the recent report from the World Economic Forum on new challenges in the FinTech space. Created by... you know... bankers and such? It has identified the fact that crypto can be moved directly between parties without recourse to authority as a major competitive challenge in the next years. As in, something of which to beware, and also something which could be leveraged to reduce costs.

They can already do this.  The fees they charge for that are just for their own profit.  This could be done for purely accounting/ledger purposes.

The only middleman in the US is the Fed and they are giving it to banks for free (right now).  ACH is comprised of the Banks and NACHA and the Fed.  The hens are so screwed as the foxes feast.

People seem surprised about this. Bitcoin is a stake at the heart of the banking cabal that runs our world. They have done their best to discredit Bitcoin but the fact is they can't really control it which is why its inevitable that they would try to make their own that satisfies their desire to inflate the currency as they wish.

I told people this was coming, sadly many will be duped. Still I don't care, hold onto the real thing, you can't save everyone.

I fully agree. that's exactly what citi, ubs, santander, ... have in mind. the regular user won't notice any change, but they could save millions.
Maybe they will encourage other banks to join their blockchain or work together to create a common blockchain so one day there will be one global bank blockchain for all money transfers.

GetGems participated in their mobile challenge and won most visionary social media solution among 80 worldwide participants, so i do not hope they have copied them somehow.

I would never use such a product but some people will just as some people will use Ripple.

In the end this sort of thing will just bring more attention to crypto. As people learn they will move towards bitcoin itself (or Monero if they value privacy) as a superior option to something run by a bank.

Sad thing is; there will be some dumb people who may buy some and give it small value.   ::)

It may be a reverse ploy by banks to show that crypto won't work - to the general, uninformed public.

That's very doubtful. There are lots of stock analysts watching Citigroup like the proverbial hawk. All of them will conclude that the announcement of Citicoin means that Citigroup is moving into cryptocurrency - at least at an experimental level. If Citigroup management pulls a "reverse ploy", those analysts will seriously question their sanity. In Wall Street and Executive Row, the kind of thinking you and I sometimes use is dismissed out of hand as "conspiracy theorizing."

Surely they will set the value for citicoin. Probably it will be worth $1 or some bonus points or something like that. You dont really believe they let a coin go free whose price is valued by the market? That would be risky, what to do when it fails? And it would be contrary to how banks work. They SET the price for things.

They have no experience in this. They should have been taking over / buying out an established altcoin or just use BTC blockchain.

They could do that or they can just experiment with open source software and build something of their own. They aren't stupid. It's actually quite cool that a bank is creating coins and testing it out. It means progress is happening in some form or another. They will never touch Bitcoin probably, too much uncertainties in their mind. We know better  ::)

I agree, they would set the price and then keep that price otherwise it could be complete chaos if it went down to 1 satoshi lol