Bitcoin Forum

Having an account for debit, easy transfers, etc. What is the closest to a bank?

The Dank Bank.

The exchanges (MtGox, BitFloor, Coinbase, etc.) are probably the closest thing to a bank currently, in that you create an account with them, transfer your money there, and then trust them to maintain control of that money for you and give it to you upon request.  BitFloor is even operating in a capacity that is a bit like Fractional Reserve, in that the balances that some people have are higher than the amount of bitcoin that BitFloor actually has on hand.  BitFloor avoids a "run" that would destroy them by marking those additional funds as "On Hold" and preventing anyone from withdrawing them until they can supply the necessary funds from their own revenue.

quality post

Yikes. Without an insurance backstop and/or a long history of responsible stewardship (plus, arguably, transparency), this  bitfloor situation strikes me as pretty risky.

It depends on which of the qualifiers is more important to you. Security? Probably Bitcoin central, mtgox, or your own armory running offline. Services like transfers and access to fiat? Probably Coinbase linked to your own bank, or maybe okpay, until the bit instant card finally comes of age.

They were hacked and had customer's bitcoins stolen back in September.  Rather than shutting down and causing everyone to permanently loose their bitcoins, the solution they chose to implement (after improving their security hopefully) was to lock all the current bitcoin balances as "On Hold".  Then they apparently intend to use revenue to repay the customers over time, releasing the "On Hold" balances a bit at a time as they can afford to do so.  This means that your balance at BitFloor can be higher than the total bitcoins they currently have control over, but you know exactly how much of it is not currently available (which is a bit less than how much you had stored there at the time of the theft).

You can read all about it here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=105818.0

EDIT: As of 2013-04-17 BitFloor has ceased all operations.

bitcoin savings and trust.   

transfers in to accounts were easy.

interest paid on deposits was great.

LOL

wallet.dat

+1

This is exactly why bitcoin was born, be your own bank

There's the islamic bank of Bitcoin but that's been under construction for awhile now, it even has a share listing on cryptostocks.