Bitcoin Forum

So for shits and giggles I went to a few major banks I have accounts with and I had a nice 50 page asset analysis booklet for them to review. I wanted to see how banks look at non-traditional assets like Bitcoin and such.

Every banker that saw the booklet when it got to bitcoin as an asset said, WHAT IS BITCOIN?

LOL

So that's four bankers running local branches for the top 4 banks in the world, they've never heard of bitcoin.

This is a TRUE STORY, they have no idea yet what bitcoin is.

Go make up an asset sheet and list your bitcoin as an asset and when your local banker gets to it, see what they say.

So banks have NO CLUE yet, which I think is a good thing. Think of my test as a walk behind enemy lines to see how banks are looking at bitcoin at this moment in time.

Did you talk to the tellers, or to the bank execs? I wouldn't be surprised if a teller at some random bank doesn't know what Bitcoin is, as they probably don't know a whole lot about banking in general. But if you are saying that you talked to CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, board members of banks and they had no idea what bitcoin is, I am going to call bullshit on that. If it is true, if you happen to have funds in any of the banks you visited, I would recommend moving them to another bank, because whatever bank you visited that isn't aware of bitcoin in NOVEMBER 2014 is run by some very uninformed people.

I have done the same for Charter One, Fifth Third Bank, PNC, BoA, and Chase.
All regional managers were even clueless, too.

However they will learn very very quickly... :D

Bitcoin will be a jobkiller in the banking sector, because whole business segments will become unnecessary. I don't think it will be the end of banking as a whole, because people still appreciate administrative money services. However the special importance of banks and their power will fade away. In a Bitcoin future, banks will be ordinary service businesses that are no longer irreplaceable. Competition will be fierce.

ya.ya.yo!

6 years ago I've asked my local bank branch that credit card I get to use at paypal.
they didn't know what paypal is back then. now I'm pretty sure that they still don't know.

when I purchase  sth via paypal they still text me automatically: "hey you used credit card internationally, if you didn't make this purchase call our call center immediately".

paypal has official office in my country that has agreements with banks but still they don't know it.

how long paypal is known?

well think about bitcoin in that way...

banks still need 10 years to understand bitcoin ;D

regional managers and branch managers? your everyday village idiot could secure those positions with ease. If you were to ask the real decision makers or people in executive positions i am sure they are all well aware of bitcoin. the average minion bank teller could just as well be the same idiot behind a supermaket till

Your wrong about it being a job killer, Banks make more than 50% of profits from loans. Electronic payments only account of a small amount of Bank profits. I have a family member who handles the Electronic portfolios of a bank. When I told her about Bitcoin she immediately ruled it out a scam and B.S. but now she's more into it.

Loans from money that is created out of thin air. If Bitcoin ever becomes THE payment method and central fiat currencies are put the way-side. Banks won't be making anywhere near as much money as they are now.

The persons that RUN the Business Loans section which are the top people.

One referred me to a vice president, and not one knew what bitcoin was.

So banks are out of the loop on Bitcoin and like I said, that's a good thing, by the time they wake up it will be way too late.

So is Bitcoin, if you want to go down that road. ;)

At least with BTC you understand the final amount in circulation 22M or so coins, with fiat, it's whatever the gov wants to create, so btc reflects are real supply/demand value for a digital fiat, whereas old world fiat reflects a manipulated worthless currency people are born to accept.

Waking up 7 Billion sheep won't be easy, but you only need to wake up millions for btc to be a major currency unit

But unlike units of fiat currency, bitcoins are generated at a fixed, predetermined rate. ;)

As the bitcoin is deflationary in nature, bankers may need less bitcoin to give loan of same value over time. So, bitcoin's fixed generation might not be a big deal here.

That's why we have inflation  ;)

They will when it eats their preferred currency.

That's nothing.  I met a credit union branch manager once who didn't know what continuously compounding interest was.

Yes and no.  Bitcoin seems big to us, but every time I inquire at any organization or speak with management really anywhere, they are completely clueless. It's easy to get lost online and think everyone understands it. The reality is,probably well over 50% of people you see everyday have 0 idea what it is.

This is a bit like going round to stablehands in 1890 and asking them what a sparkplug is.

Great example!!

Try to open a bitcoin business account, they will shut you down very quickly, showing that they not only know about bitcoin, but also well prepared to fire fighting at any moment  :D

They are not interested in bitcoin is because they don't count that risk asset to be something that they can manage

no matter, we need not open a bitcoin account in any banks.  :)

Next time ask them how Dollars are made. It's not their fault, it is not the job of a bank manager to know what Bitcoin is or even how many dollars are out there. It's a great opportunity for you to educate and expand the use of Bitcoin.

Yea I think bankers are clueless about bitcoin unless they use them of course.. A small amount of them do I'm sure

The vast majority of banks/credit unions (probably all of them) do not use continuously compounding interest (they usually use monthly compounding interest) and as a result they have no reason to need to know about it. The same is true with bitcoin.

Another explanation is that banks do not offer any bitcoin related products (nor any continuously compounding products) therefore discussing bitcoin with you would almost certainly not result in a sale for them and as a result they will try to avoid discussing it with you

The kool aid drinkers in regards to how big and bad btc is and how banks and governments are trembling is why it was done, to show how minor btc is to the world at large, if anyone in the world outside of btc fans should know about btc it's the business managers of banks, not one heard of it, it shows the problem btc has, it's still UNKNOWN by most of the world.

So as much as you and your small universe of people YOU KNOW may have heard of btc, 99.9% of the world still has no clue what bitcoin is.

They could have heard the news about silk road and it still did not register, most people are morons and don't understand most of what they read and hear.

So btc is and will be for a long time for a very small amount of people, and even at that tiny % of people it still has major value, you only need 1% of the world to embrace btc and with 80 trillion global world production per year, that 1% is huge.

800 Billion is 1% of the GWP.

With 8 billion or so market cap btc is right now .01% of the GWP as to its value

At 5K btc it will be .1% of GWP as to its value and the only real world number showing how popular btc is as a % of the world is the number of wallets that blockchain.info says it has issued.

So the next milestone for btc is 7M wallets as reported by blockchain.info

It's only a little over 2M the last time I checked

So 700K wallets was the last milestone and that created the 400 buck or so real world value

7M wallets creates the next value bubble of 4K to 5K

Bitcoin doesn't need bankers or investors, it needs to be used by 7M wallets to reach 4K bitcoin value

supply and demand

it's that simple

so creating uses for bitcoin ONLY like gambling, or porn or whatever including drug sites is how you fuel the user base

99.99% of humanity is too stupid to look at bitcoin and say I need this

if you tie btc to a VICE activity and the online casino or porn site says we only take bitcoin since we're tired of banks freezing our assets as well as governments, then people into vice will acquire bitcoin and use it on vice sites

that's how you grow bitcoin

just like having a bitcoin only super cheap site for digital downloads at say .10 cents, that will fuel people to buy 10 bucks of bitcoin so they can get 100 downloads of music, books, videos, software whatever

1 buck downloads is the cap now on sites like itunes due to visa/mastercard having a 35 cent or so trans fee

btc is around 12 cents, so 10 cent download and 12 cent trans fee, you could sell 10 cent items for 22 cents

however, if the operator sells 5 or 10 buck accounts, then the account deductions cost nothing since the operator of such sites do it, then a person could buy 1.00 or 5.00 or 10.00 of downloads at one transaction, and pay the network the 12 cents it wants and then they can buy their 10 or 50 or 100 songs

if you have a way to force people to use bitcoin they will find a way to buy it or acquire it

the only problem with the 10 cent download idea is that as soon as you get up to 1.00 or more you do not need bitcoin since normal banks will take the trans

anyway, that's what btc needs a mega million user base using it, and music downloads is a possible network for btc as well as books and even films

integrating bitcoin into a real NEED is what btc needs

all the merchants in the world can say they take bitcoin, so what, why does the average consumer need it?

it's not like credit, they get credit for free so they want credit to buy what they have NO MONEY FOR

the people that acquire bitcoin have the money to do so, unless they do it on credit cards

most people are broke, most of the world is still 3rd world status

you give some chick or dude that makes 10 bucks USD a week in Indonesia that has to go to a wifi cafe to even use the net a reason to have btc, they will buy music all day at 10 cents

most of the world can't afford 1 buck music

just like bitcoin gambling it's fueled right now by penny players

even fraction penny players

who plays for that minor amount?

3rd world nations

so with billions of smart phones now in the world and lots of them being used in wifi cafes in 3rd world nations, the real break through for btc will be giving the 3rd world something they want and cannot afford with traditional banks

gambling and music is what I see growing btc quickly

1 cent slots and 10 cent music

that's what the 3rd world wants

and most people on the planet live in 3rd world conditions and have 10 to 20 buck weekly INCOMES

yeah but that is surprising they don't know a basic concept like that. 

I guess the lesson is never underestimate the ignorance of the masses.

Tellers have more in common with people working at Starbucks then they do real bankers.  Try asking a portfolio manager, compliance leader or marketing exec

Yep. Quite foolish to say Banks (as a whole) know nothing about Bitcoin after speaking to one teller whilst withdrawing 50$ life savings. Not cool bro

Even the big shot bankers don't know. They live in the illusion that velocity means something for the money value, and since there are limitations in the blockchain, it couldn't possibly work.

why do you think velocity doesn't matter?

I think bankers higher on the food chain are well aware. But what you are advocating is essentially go talk to joe schmoe and ask if he heard about bitcoin imho.

Though, they should if they are into investments. It was the same way when I asked at work for my company 401k to add the bitcoin fund from fidelity. I think fidelity discontinued it or never implemented it though eventually.

Talking to guys with MBA's that run the business banking department and have VP titles were the clueless twits

So you're all acting like I spoke to tellers, I spoke to a bank manager at wells fargo that was in charge of business accounts and I spoke to guys with MBA's running the biz account sections of

BOA
Citi
Chase

Never saw a teller and all my stuff is done online, so I haven't walked into a branch in years

yet these were the top bank employees that should understand business and they were clueless about bitcoin which reflects the reality that btc is a niche currency with no market share, it's why it's only around 9bil cap today and not 900bil or 9 trillion

btc has miles to go, it's a niche currency with no major penetration even into bankers running business accounts which should know about it

I spoke to my branch manager of the Bank...which is probably the most popular one in the country n its sort of Government backed....N she had no clue on what I was talking about.! which is a good thing...but if everyone keeps bringing that up..!! she might google it n start talking abt it to her colleagues.!

They may have heard about it, but they dont fully process it. They may have a vague general idea of it as "something bad for us", not a 100% accurate objective view on it.

It doesn't.

It is absurd in its basis. If you hold bitcoins and reconsider, now you want to buy a house: It solely depends on what the seller of the house (the buyer of bitcoins) does. If he holds, like you did before, nothing has happened on the aggregate.

The velocity the modern keynesians speak about, does not include financial transactions.

Maybe they include capital expenditure, but mostly they want to capture consumption expenditure. Therefore, it is more a number to describe economic output, just like GDP.

It is never measured, it is computed using that awful formula. The effect is that it is a general corrector, computed to make that formula seem correct in practice.

Maybe you prefer people with name saying something about it:

https://mises.org/library/velocity-circulation (https://mises.org/library/velocity-circulation)

To be clear: The market value of bitcoin comes from the preference to hold more (and the action to buy), which is demand, and the preference to hold less (and the action to sell), which is the supply.

You can not compute a number from that, but you can exclude things that number of transactions directly. Indirectly, more transactions means more people are involved, and that can indicate future demand.

I think the best analysis of Bitcoin was the guy that showed the 4 past bubbles and tied them to a ten-fold increase in wallets from blockchain.info

Each 10 fold increase in wallets had a a 10 fold bubble price

So last bubble was 700K wallets and 500 bubble, it went to 1200 though

The one before was 70K wallets and 50 bubble that went to 100 or so

So next bubble is 5K and should go to 10K when blockchain.info reports their 7 millionth wallet

Last I check they were around 2M

Decisions will not be made to decline to open (or to close) an account based on if the customer is involved in bitcoin because bitcoin is "bad for them". The decision to close an account will be based on the overall risk level the account presents to the bank.

Try your experiment at a market moving bank. Make sure to address the head investment executive.

Try these banks.

Goldmahn Sachs
JP Morgan
Barclays
Deutsche Bank AG
Bank of Nova Scotia
HSBC
Societe Generale
Bank of America

I promise each of the right people in these banks knows exactly what bitcoin is. And most likely if you are talking to the right person and have an account there your account has been tagged for mystery charges to appear, if you invest in one of these banks and mention Bitcoin as an investment client there your portfolio will disappear within days of mentioning Bitcoins as an asset.

The banks listed above are Market Movers, banks who do the most ruthless of financial crimes and get away with slaps on the wrists. Barclays has been taken to court 2 times for the same crime only 3 years apart from each other. The crime involved gold contracts both times. They blamed the investment exec, they were fined less than 20% of what they made committing the crime, and then paid the exec handsomely before he was terminated as per the court ruling.

They dont like anything that prevent them from knowing client information.

So why should they?

But one thing is for certain,

Bitcoin will illuminate them.