Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

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>The status quo comes at great cost — high rents paid to financial intermediary institutions along with other various and protected oligarchies.

So far so good.

>However, it also provides benefits in the form of public goods.

Hmm.

>It generates and sustains core functions of the broader state and economy such as tools to capture tax revenues, prevent money laundering and terrorism financing, capacity to control the money supply, protect consumers and investors, and ensure market integrity and even (a degree of) financial stability.

Tools to capture tax revenue, prevent money laundering, and prevent terrorist financing? I thought tax evasion and money laundering were some of the services they offered! Protect consumers and investors? Secure financial stability? What?? Did everybody forget about 2008 already? A small elite set of people KNOWINGLY wrecked the world economy, calculatedly corrupted our political, regulatory, and academic bodies to ensure no responsibility ever come to them, let alone demands of repayment, flipped the incentives around to become fabulously rich and rewarded for driving their companies into the ground and ruining their clients, got paid to lie and deceive, to give lectures and papers and audits saying everything was a-OK, to lie to clients about the junk they were peddling, to take regulatory roles and stand aside... If you want to see it this way, doubtless millions of excess deaths are attributable to their actions. Make no mistake, if they could get away with it they would murder your entire family in cold blood for a hundred bucks.

The current financial/banking scheme can very well go fuck itself. It's difficult to do worse than this; it's a broken in almost every way, except in securing power and vast wealth to a select group of people. Note, I'm not saying blockchain will surely bring about anything better.

Regardless of whether the banks deserved to fall after 2008 or not, I'm struggling to of any way in which things would have been different with cryptocurrencies.

Do you seriously think that one wouldn't be able to construct fraudulent financial instruments on top of cryptocurrencies just like you can with the regular financial system?

If you think that there is a difference in this regard I recommend you investigate how these financial instruments were actually constructed.

Perhaps one fundamental difference between the normal financial system and the more popular cryptocurrencies is in the way the money supply is managed. In the traditional system money becomes very cheap in specific periods, coincidentally or not right before major crisis events, which can act as gas on fire. In contrast, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum have a more restrained issuance schedule, which some people or schools of economic thought argue that can lead to better emergent outcomes in the overall economy, avoid the boom and bust cycle. But of course, you can still build financial tricks based on them, but they might not have the same effect on the overall economy.

No.

I could go and found a bitcoin bank in which anyone can open an account. The catch? The bank runs a single wallet to back all accounts. The only promise made by the bank is that if you deposit X bitcoins, you'll get X bitcoins back when you request to withdraw them. I'll also allow you instant transfers between the accounts. They are off the blockchain, managed only in the bank's database, so these transactions can be arbitrarily fast.

If the wallet accumulates enough bitcoins so that it exceeds the normal volume of deposits and withdrawals, I'll take the rest and put them to work. Maybe buy shares in companies or so. I'll keep the earnings of these investments. If I make a loss, I'll have to recover the loss somehow. That's the risk I take.

At that point, I'd have created virtual bitcoins in the market. And who would be stopping me?

In today's world, a regulated exchange is prevented by law and auditors from doing that. Banks can do it because they're backed up by deposit insurance and central bank lending. A crypto exchange doing it would likely go bust sooner or later; this may have already happened and been called a "hack," but people are learning not to trust sketchy exchanges.

In some future crypto-based world, exchanges can be fully audited on a blockchain. Using technologies like Plasma you can even have a cryptographic guarantee that you'll be able to get your money back out, even though the exchange itself runs on a fast central database. The sort of crypto bank you're describing would have a hard time competing with that.

The crypto bank that puts deposits to work can pay interest. The 100% reserve bank can’t. That’s how it competes.

Consumers will use it because they already use banks without 100% reserves such as Bank of America, HSBC, any current bank in the banking system...

Yes but banks are protected by the mechanisms I mentioned.

What happens if financial institutions cannot "create money", i.e. make loans?

I don't have all the answers about how a new economic system might work, but some possibilities I can think of include:

- New cryptocurrencies (possibly built on smart contract platforms) could replicate some features of the banking system

- Some loans could be based on deposits instead of new money creation (i.e. the naive view of how banks work)

- Easier creation of equity instruments based on crypto tokens could substitute for debt financing

One thing that fascinates me about all this is the ease of experimenting with new ideas. I don't know where we'll end up, but I'm optimistic that this messy process will end up advancing civilization.

That outcome is certainly possible. But even that scenario would be quite a departure from what we have now, where banks have almost no reserve requirement and they can create as much money as can be absorbed in the economy, which in turn is influenced mainly by central bank interest rate. Lending money entails risk and in a situation where the interest is set by a central bank and there are little to no reserve requirements, that risk gets shifted to the population that has to bailout the banks.

In the scenario that you outlined, its probable that the reserve would much higher than the current 1-3%, which would lead to risk being more directly held by the bank making the loans and the depositors of that bank. And the argument goes that this might lead to more skin in the game and probably less reckless behaviour. Also, in such a system interest rates would be set by the market, based on the amounts of savings in the economy and the demand for loans.

> But even that scenario would be quite a departure from what we have now, where banks have almost no reserve requirement and they can create as much money as can be absorbed in the economy, which in turn is influenced mainly by central bank interest rate.

I don't see how a Bitcoin bank as outlined above can be regulated to have a reserve requirement either. Arguably, this offers even less protection than a traditional bank, due to the inability of the public sphere to regulate it. And still, as long as a Bitcoin bank is perceived as sufficiently trustworthy based on past behavior, people would use it.

Next, I don't share your view that interest rates being set by the market is a good thing. Economies were far more fragile and volatile back when they were backed by bullion. The vast majority of people who have income from labor comparable to their net worth prefer that their net worth not fluctuate so much that they may not consistently maintain their standard of living, and this is helped by a steady interest rate. A rational agent prefers this unless their net worth greatly eclipses their ability to obtain wealth from other forms of capital.

I don't have full conviction that the situation I described will lead to better outcomes but I am not convinced by the current system either, and it's worth considering how the system could work with the newer tools that we now have.

> I don't see how a Bitcoin bank as outlined above can be regulated to have a reserve requirement either. Arguably, this offers even less protection than a traditional bank, due to the inability of the public sphere to regulate it. And still, as long as a Bitcoin bank is perceived as sufficiently trustworthy based on past behavior, people would use it.

The reserve requirement is something set through the political process so is independent of the properties of the money, so that can go either way both in a fiat or cryptocurrency system. The difference with cryptocurrencies is that you don't have as much need to store them in a bank. One reason to loan them to the bank is to get some kind of return on the money. In this situation reckless behaviour might be driven out faster, just like in the hedgefund industry.

> Next, I don't share your view that interest rates being set by the market is a good thing. Economies were far more fragile and volatile back when they were backed by bullion. The vast majority of people who have income from labor comparable to their net worth prefer that their net worth not fluctuate so much that they may not consistently maintain their standard of living, and this is helped by a steady interest rate. A rational agent prefers this unless their net worth greatly eclipses their ability to obtain wealth from other forms of capital.

Since I get most of my income from labour, I can tell you that I would prefer to have a slight deflation in prices every year and maintain my purchasing power, without having to go through all kind of hoops and loops to invest my money in bonds, stocks and other risky things.

As to old economies being backed by bullion, I tend to agree there. Bullion can be a poor monetary base due to its lack of divisibility. But there were probably more things that lead to fragile economies than the fact that money was backed by bullion.

Of course, there are problems with limited money supply systems. How would governments finance wars? You would have to finance things through taxation which is very unpopular.

I just don't see your reasoning. By what mechanism that is not provided today would the banks stop doing what they do today? What mechanism would control the exposure that banks take on?

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are easier to store securely compared to bunches of cash, which would lead to less pressure to store them in a bank. Deposits would be incentivised using interest rates (set by the market). That and the banks not being able to create money would lead to them being more dependent on deposits; this in turn would put more pressure on banks that exhibit risky behaviour and favour banks that keep a healthy balance sheet.

And why would there be more pressure to adjust risky behaviour? Because people would take their money out of banks that exhibit that behaviour, which would re-inforce behaviour that has the right ratio of risk/return. This does not happen now because banks don't need almost any deposits to make profit.

This risk adjustment already happens in financial sectors that have skin in the game. For example, if a hedge fund looses money, sooner or later people will take their money out of it.

Not that long ago there was this article posted on HN: https://hacked.com/last-years-crypto-boom-was-fixed-research...

Please reread my last sentence.

become fabulously rich and rewarded for driving their companies into the ground and ruining their clients, got paid to lie and deceive, to give lectures and papers and audits saying everything was a-OK, to lie to clients about the junk they were peddling, to take regulatory roles and stand aside.

Have you seen what many ICOs are like?

The crisis was largely due in part to deregulation and private companies getting kick backs for their ratings. Crypto currency is mostly unregulated and rated on a private market. Also, there is a small elite group of people who own most of the crypto currency, which very quickly and easily could result in market manipulation at the expense of small holders. While your anger is understandable and banks are indeed criminal, cryptocoins are just as susceptible to criminal behavior as any other market place and even more so do to the lack of regulation. And I’d just like to note that major banks like Goldman are saying that btc is bullshit while quietly buying a massive stake in it. So, the fact is, the banks will get involved if it’s worth money and they will manipulate the market, so we will be right back where we started.

With one important difference. There will be no QE ever.

Unless you rename QE to something like "hard fork".

In order to preserve the integrity of the blockchain the following actions must be taken...

Except that users are in control.

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