Even if players don't know who you are, Concord should....then allow Concord to go after all your accounts.....

Nobody I know would put their T2 BPO into a third party's hands.

Would you?

I'm guessing there are no NPC banks because given EVE's culture of scams and exploits, it would kill the system. Shame really, because it would be cool.

Or am I just daft?

Hmm I have held T2 BPOs as collateral some times, what's strange with that?

Were they ammo BPOs or something more valuable?

Come on, you can tell!

I stand corrected.

Were they ammo BPOs or something more valuable?

Come on, you can tell!

The trouble with Banking in EvE is that it can only really be done the same way banking was done in the 19th century. Which is insufficient for such a connected galaxy. I did business with Ricdic's Bank on several occasions, but really it worked more like a investment bank than any useful end user banking. As it stands, EvE doesn't give us enough sand to flesh something like that out in any useful format.

So in conclusion, any attempts at a bank might as well just be calling themselves a mutual fund.

Whats wrong with depositing money into an NPC corp that collects interest. It could be like a CD I believe where you couldent pull out the isk for a certain amount of time.

I know you belligerent vets hate the idea of "Isk faucets" instead of complaining about "isk faucets" How about you figure new ideas for "Isk drains" other then PVP herpaderpa.

How much did you lose then?

Stuff

[...]

For several reasons I think it wouldn't be that simple.

1. The bank in my suggestion can only lend out money it got from players. ISK is not created, just redistributed - it should be obvious why this is very important (actually you'll find a possible exception to this rule towards the end of my suggestion).
2. The formula to determine the value of the item you want to use as collateral was meant as an example. I would expect something more sophisticated if such a system goes life (like taking into account price spikes, trading volume, volatility). But even this very simple approach uses the lower value from current value and median value over the last 3 months. Sure, it's possible to manipulate the market even on a 3 month scale. But with an item that's traded by many it will cost you a LOT of ISK. Add to this the fact that you only get 70% of the items value (in my example) and it gets even harder.
3. If you remove money from the bank you'll affect the banks operational numbers. In my suggestion I mentioned the total amount of loans and deposits. Even if we assume that we forgot to implement safeguards, like increasing interest rates when the total loans/total deposits ratio shifts in an undesirable direction or like a stop of lending out ISK when a certain threshold is reached you still risk to crash the bank, losing access to your collateral items before you even closed the difference between the reduced value and the actual value.

I'm not saying that it would be impossible to abuse such a system. But at least it wouldn't be easy. (Besides, I'm just saying such a system could work. I'm not saying that we really need NPC banks.)

Characters are disposable, so characters cannot be punished. Accounts cannot be punished because those are also disposable.

Without a way to punish, there is no hope of a real bank. There needs to be a way to tie debt to a real person, not characters and accounts.

The only other way is to require some sort of collateral, but this method would need to be well thought out to keep the system from being gamed.

After a certain level of trust especially in EVE, there isn't much point in scamming, as being legitimate is so much more profitable.

I don't think the questions was IF an npc bank could work, as that's really not a difficult task. It's having some improvements made to the tools available for players to properly run a bank on their own. Sinks and faucets aside, an NPC bank would be a negative thing for a sanbox game like we currently have. CCP are in constant development to reduce the input of NPC and AI and actively trying to let the players run the "system". They do so by removing npc goods, and adding tools to allow players to create new businesses and services.