Should banks offer Bitcoin custody and payment services?

[keithers]

read all of the bank announcements. they only deal with fiat directly. not bitcoins, not baked beans not gold.

if you want bitcoins go to an exchange/localbitcoins
if you want baked beans go to a grocery store
if you want gold go to a pawn shop.

if banks included bitcoins as on of their 'financial products' then regulation will own bitcoins

thanks for the reply. Understand that most banks are staying away from BTC. But what if a Bank would offer such services, that is my question.

Edit: and I do mean a respectable, traditional Bank.

Banks will only start to offer BTC services if/when they can figure out a way to make serious money off of it.   That, or if the market evolves so much that customers stop leaving certain banks that are not offering BTC services.

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[DeathAndTaxes]

as for the ICICI they dont hand out real gold ounces, just certificates. (bits of paper)

You can lead a horse to water ... but you can make him read the link.  They do "hand out" real gold.

The gold / silver piece(s) are sold to the Customer/s and delivered to the Customer/s / Redemee as the case may be, by ICICI Bank in a sealed and tamper-proof condition, with certain exceptions for which tamper-proof and sealed gold / silver pieces are presently not available.

[Ilsk]

Banks are already looking at bitcoin more than we can imagine, and I know it for sure.

Most people will always need banks, and banks need to make money with bitcoin.

[mgoldfinger]

Interesting link:

http://www.doge-coins.nl/news-2/dutch-bank-abn-amro-reportedly-experimenting-bitcoin/

I also read several articles that suggest banks are mostly interested in the underlying technology.

[DannyElfman]

Remember Cyprus.

that was not really a bank, now was it. I am talking more about banks such as: Barclays, Bank Of America. Standard Bank, etc.

The banks in that country had to restrict the amount of money their deposit holders could transfer to banks outside of the country and essentially gave deposit holders a haircut because the banks as a whole were in such bad shape.

[Bagatell]

Remember Cyprus.

that was not really a bank, now was it. I am talking more about banks such as: Barclays, Bank Of America. Standard Bank, etc.

The banks in that country had to restrict the amount of money their deposit holders could transfer to banks outside of the country and essentially gave deposit holders a haircut because the banks as a whole were in such bad shape.

There's a thread about it

My bank account's got robbed by European Commission. Over 700k is lost.

[Nerazzura]

Isn't the whole point of bitcoins that we don't need any bank?

use Bitcoin as a payment has not been stable. Meanwhile, the use of e-money, credit card, or bank transfer as a payment instrument is attractive and easy to do by anyone. Well, if Bitcoin could eventually become a global currency that is recognized as a credit card? We'll wait!

[monim1]

read all of the bank announcements. they only deal with fiat directly. not bitcoins, not baked beans not gold.

if you want bitcoins go to an exchange/localbitcoins
if you want baked beans go to a grocery store
if you want gold go to a pawn shop.

if banks included bitcoins as on of their 'financial products' then regulation will own bitcoins

I agree with you. I have also found that BTC are illegal in few countries.

[GODLIKE]

Why I can't vote?

[franky1]

why let central banks offer bitcoins which will add alot of red tape, regulation and make central banks the main holder of bitcoins.

thus playing into the hands of the current broken FIAT system. instead we should get out of the basement dwellers badly coded wallets. and get PRIVATE businesses with proper financial experience to replace the broken central banks, by making wallet services that have bank-level security infrastructure and proper liability insurance.

if mtgox had liability insurance. mtgox would not have caused as much damage as it did.

[coffee999]

Maybe they should, but now they sometimes are doing the opposite http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1inixa/bank_of_the_west_is_shutting_down_our_bank/

[ShakyhandsBTCer]

I don't care how much regulation you throw at them. If you let them bitcoins in custody we'll have one billion bitcoins in circulation before a year. They simply can't be trusted.

Thats not possible; Banks can't just create more bitcoins, just like a bank can not produce more gold or simply issue more stocks of a certain company. (that is the beauty of the Bitcoin)

actually, if banks did hold bitcoins as a financial product they offer. it wouldnt be to much of a stretch for them to try off-chain transactions.
by giving people a SQL bank database balance of bitcoins and let people trade the database (leading to fractional reserving) where there are only 21million real bitcoins, but the banks showing 1billion bitcoins on their SQL database..

... just like the current FIAT debt crisis
... just like karpals let people trade his SQL database while hiding the real coins.

Banks would probably not do this as it would be very difficult to force someone to pay them back in bitcoin. The closest thing they could do to this would be sue them for fiat and then use that fait to purchase bitcoin on an exchange.

Another issue is the interest rate they would need to pay to get people to deposit bitcoin (and the interest rate they would need to charge borrowers). Interest rates in terms of bitcoin are just too high for this to make sense for them to try to do.

[rext]

Why I can't vote?

try refreshing the page

[mgoldfinger]

good old bump!

[BillyBobJoe]

Isn't the whole point of bitcoins that we don't need any bank?

But that does not rule out the possibility. A bank could offer the service and those who chose to can take advantage of that service.

[justusranvier]

I strongly expect that some sort of audited, regulated, insured custody accounts will exist in the future.

So do I.

They won't be traditional banks though - they will be new entities which are audited and regulated by cryptography.

http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Voting_Pools

[Denise520]

In China, you will not see Bitcoin in a bank. All banks just deal with fiat money.

[DannyElfman]

I strongly expect that some sort of audited, regulated, insured custody accounts will exist in the future.

So do I.

They won't be traditional banks though - they will be new entities which are audited and regulated by cryptography.

http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Voting_Pools

I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of "audited" and "regulated" custody service, however I think that it would be very unlikely that it would be insured.

The fact that whoever knows the private keys of an address can control the unspent inputs of that address makes it too difficult to measure the amount of risk of potential loss.