I can't get bites on USD @ 2.25% monthly, much less BTC. I'd be very, very jealous if you get this. Keep this updated so I know when to cry.  

This situation might be resolved now. They no longer pass through a USB hub. If they both still go down around the same time, my second guess is that it may be a networking issue. My connection goes through three different routers and hiccups once a day or so.


ETA: Ozco.in image is delayed by ~10m, I believe, so just give it a few minutes to update if you're really interested. BDK.BND also received a 2000BTC buy this morning. BDK.BND now pays ~105BTC/month for 2630BTC, which is unprecedented and fantastic -- I'm really pleased. BDK has recently greatly increased its position in Cognitive, and I'm glad to be a part of it. I should be able to point to a Hermes announcement within a couple weeks. All the proceeds of the Pirate withdrawal will be going toward that project, and BDK is also investing in another yet-to-be-announced project as well as YABMC bonds under market price. So - exciting stuff.

ETA2: I'll make another announcement when I have the funds from the Pirate withdrawal today.

It takes longer to send them out from US to NZ or wherever than domestically, so they sent the first ones printed out to international subscribers. They weren't all instantaneously printed in one day, so the later batches were sent later to US subscribers a couple days ago. I'm not involved, though, so don't know anything beyond that.

csv file does not include asset transfer fees. It's not in fee table on GLBSE, either. I need to know what I paid so my sheets is accurit.

They sent International issues first to compensate for the shipping delay. US issues were sent out a couple days ago, I believe. So... they should arrive very soon.

An additional 20k BDK.BND bonds have been sold, bringing the total up to 26300. I currently have no use for funds beyond this, so there shouldn't be any giant askwalls any time soon. 

Surprisingly clean, round number. For a while, the total dividend paid will likely be 26.3BTC every Monday (next Monday is on the 21st).

Cheers!

If any investors or potential investors (either in BDK or BDK.BND) have questions, comments, whatever - feel free to hit me up on Skype (Name: Ben Malec -- Skype Name: bdk_kluge -- add a note so I can recognize you as someone from here and not a rando commando). I also hang out in #bitcoin-assets. I'm almost always logged in, but not always on. Probably not snubbing you if it takes me a day to respond. 


For those interested in CDs and don't have interest in receiving bonds on GLBSE, feel free to PM me and we can work something out. I was hoping to do everything on GLBSE, but liquidity on BDK.BND is terrible right now (I will resolve this problem myself if it proves necessary) and completely understand if someone'd rather do CDs. As well, I'm willing to convert BDK.BND to a CD if you'd like.

Cheers!

There's a minor issue with the Icarus boards causing them to reset once every 2 days or so. I'm guessing it's related to the USB hub or cables. Simply disconnecting the hub from the PC and reconnecting it solves the problem. Will get it sorted out by end of tomorrow.

If any investors or potential investors (either in BDK or BDK.BND) have questions, comments, whatever - feel free to hit me up on Skype (Name: Ben Malec -- Skype Name: bdk_kluge -- add a note so I can recognize you as someone from here and not a rando commando). I also hang out in #bitcoin-assets. I'm almost always logged in, but not always on. Probably not snubbing you if it takes me a day to respond. 


For those interested in CDs and don't have interest in receiving bonds on GLBSE, feel free to PM me and we can work something out. I was hoping to do everything on GLBSE, but liquidity on BDK.BND is terrible right now and completely understand if someone'd rather do CDs. As well, I'm willing to convert BDK.BND to a CD if you'd like.

Cheers!

Bank A's reserves are made up of waaaay more cash than what they need to keep on-hand for Joe Bob. They're not just loaning to Joe Bob, but likely tens of thousands of other people who also make up Bank A's cash reserves. Let's say Bank A has $5b total of deposits. Bank A thus needs $450m in reserves, so they'll have no problem paying Joe Bob if he needs money right away, and if four other people withdrew $100m on the same day, Bank A would simply request an intra-bank loan (often called "overnight loans"). These short-term loans by banks to other banks ensure they're able to meet the reserve ratio for cash-on-hand enforced by government regulators. In this case, Bank A has -$50m and needs a ~$525m loan from another bank. These loans usually happen within a few hours because banks have established reputations with each other. We do something similar with Bitcoins. If I need to pay a depositor but don't have enough on-hand, I ask Patrick or someone along those lines for a short-term loan I pay a minimal % on. When I'm able to liquidate my investments, or loan repayments are made to me, I pay Pat.

Now we're getting somewhere, and that's why I think more options should exist. Banks which keep full reserves are essentially payment processors providing online banking and safe storage of money, and they'll charge depositors some annual % as well as much higher fees than we're used to.

If people want to get paid for depositing, they should commit to long-term loan contracts (CDs).

That still doesn't make sense. The amount doesn't multiply.

If Joe Bob loans $100m to Bank A, then Bank A deposits in Bank B, then Bank B deposits in Bank C....

Bank A is only allowed to loan $91m to Bank B and must keep $9m on-hand to pay all of their depositors. Bank A now has $9m in cash, $91m as an asset in the form of a deposit, but they still have a $100m liability to Joe Bob, so they're done -- Bank A can't loan out any more of the $100m. They have $100m assets, $100m liabilities from the transaction.

Bank B now has a $91m deposit (cash). Bank B needs to keep $8.19m as a cash reserve and deposits $82.81m in Bank C. Bank B now has $8.19m as cash, and $82.81m as an asset in the form of a deposit with Bank C, but they still have a $91m liability to Bank B. Bank B is now done, they can't loan anymore money from the transaction which started with Joe Bob's deposit.


Bank C now has $82.81m, and let's say they loan it out to Producto Corp. at an interest rate high enough to profit off the deposit they got from Bank B. Bank C needs to keep $7.4529m in reserves to pay depositors, so they loan $75.3571m to Producto Corp.



Let's looks at the totals:

Assets created on paper: $373.81m ($24.6429m held as cash by the banks, $349.1671m in assets as the form of deposits)
Liabilities created on paper: $373.81m (assuming the times match up perfectly, when Bank C is repaid by Producto Corp., they pay Bank B $82.81m + interest, Bank B pays Bank A $91m + interest, and Bank A pays back Joe Bob $100m + interest)
Amount of money created when the transaction's over: 0 (they cancel each other out)

Yeah - I guess Bank A and Bank B could keep depositing money in each other, and then they could build up their assets (AND liabilities) by quadrillions but it doesn't make sense. It doesn't create any additional money to loan, just a bunch of pointless paperwork.


ETA: The exact same thing could be done with Bitcoin, except we're not subject to reserve ratios, so we could actually lend the whole amount out infinitely to each other. I loan Patrick 100BTC, he loans me 100BTC, and we keep doing it back and forth. We could have 1 trillion BTC worth of assets, but we'd also have $1t worth of liabilities. We could even not do the BTC exchange and just pass along "IOU BTC" notes to each other. Lending/depositing with each other doesn't create money, it just creates assets and liabilities on paper.

I'm still not "getting it." Banks don't get to pick a reserve amount and then are able to loan out some multiple of that, they have to keep a % of deposits on-hand as a reserve. The alternative to fractional-reserve and full-reserve is no-reserve, where banks can freely loan out as much cash as they have -- it doesn't mean they get to create an infinite amount of cash to loan out.

Let's say the reserve ratio for banks in the US is a flat 9%. That means if a bank has $100b in deposits, they must keep $9b as cash or something which can be near-immediately turned into cash or regulators will shut them down. It doesn't mean that banks can use the $100b from deposits and claim it as a reserve which multiplies their amount to lend to $1.11t. I'm pretty darn sure that doesn't happen anywhere, though if I'm wrong, my mind'd be blown.

1) Only if the bank allows demand deposits, and those usually have restrictions stated in contracts, such as with ATM cards' daily & per-transaction limits (though those are also to protect against fraudulent purchases being too out of control -- many banks will change the limits if you ask nicely).
2) I'd imagine most depositors think they do, but if people were stupid enough to believe the banks have full reserves of deposits, there would never be bank runs (except in cases where the bank has extremely negative equity) because depositors would "know" there should be no liquidity problems possible.
3) The problem you imply is why demand deposit schemes aren't implemented in the Bitcoin community. Successfully operating a bank with demand deposits and FRB requires a large volume of money spread across MANY different people. Meanwhile, CD programs are designed to fill the need of large depositors ($100k+). They're granted a higher interest rate but severely penalized if they withdraw early. This allows the bank to plan for when they need to have large reserves of cash on hand to pay those CD-holders. Since BTC lenders don't deal with thousands of accounts, we can really only do CDs or bonds. That's not because of anything inherent with Bitcoin, but because it would lead to disastrous bank runs.


The market is what should be finding what the proper reserve ratio is, not the government - meaning banks should not be forced by threat of state violence to hold any % of deposits in reserve, including 100%. If a bank tells a depositor that they have access to their funds via contract, then the bank needs to honor that or the depositor should be able to sue.

Linkbucks is a pretty popular service which does something along those lines. You can link to a Youtube video (or whatever content people are interested in) using Linkbucks, but people first have to see an ad on Linkbucks (paid to the person who refers others) before Linkbucks allows them see the content on Youtube or wherever.

It appears that with fiveminutecoin, the "content" is "free" Bitcoins.

Fractional-reserve -- a fraction of reserves are kept as cash-on-hand for deposits. Full-reserve -- a full reserve of deposits is kept as cash-on-hand. Banks can't loan out more than what the have deposited with them unless they have equity (more assets than liabilities). The Fed can create money and loan it to commercial banks for free or near-free, but this isn't related to FRB - that's money creation as it usually happens in the current world.

I'm not sure if Austrians are using some obsolete definition or if we're confused.

For some reason, the concepts of money creation and FRB are being blurred together in this thread. I sure as Hell don't keep 100% FV of deposits or bonds in my wallet.

Good luck getting consumers to pay the ~2-3% banks pay annually on deposits for customer services (+ a generous service charge so the bank can profit).

Though, in Bitcoin, we've simply dropped the idea of demand deposit schemes entirely (with Pirate being a partial exception). Interest-bearing demand-deposit schemes don't work without huge deposit volume spread among many people (that is, your local bank is probably multitudes more likely to run into a liquidity problem if someone makes a large deposit, which is probably a contributing factor to why banks have become so consolidated and perhaps why central banks are popular). CDs work well, but they're not popular for fiat currency (becoming difficult to even find a bank offering them), at least in the US -- banks generally give unreasonably low rates on them (~1% annually with multi-year commitments -- extremely favorable rate for the bank considering the costs and risks of demand deposit money), though, which don't often justify keeping the money locked away like that. I'd guess if FRB & free savings accounts were done away with, though, CDs would make a comeback, and banks would probably be scrambling for funds, creating competition and more reasonable rates of ~2-3% annually.


Which reminds me... Why do libertarians always call money creation fractional-reserve banking? Forcing banks to keep full reserves would stop the beneficial effects of central banks creating money to lend to commercial banks, but why not just be against money creation instead of FRB???

Askwall taken down.

Last Valuation on 5/3 -- today is 5/17

GLBSE Securities Re-valuation (reconciliation between BDK sheets & GLBSE):
TyGrr: BDK - 2.08BTC/share, GLBSE - 1.9BTC/share -- total loss of 44.46BTC on paper
Cognitive: BDK - .58BTC/share, GLBSE - .59001BTC/share -- total gain of 14.28BTC on paper
Gigamining: BDK - 1.509BTC/share, GLBSE - 1.519BTC/share -- total gain of 8.47BTC on paper
BitcoinTorrentz: BDK - .931BTC/share, GLBSE - 1.19BTC/share -- total gain of 1.04BTC on paper

Total equity FMV change since last valuation -- loss of 20.67BTC

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