The Banking Code

Talking about setting up a bank per se will not work without Ama's enforceable contract system.

I like Lordfly's idea of a venture capital sort of group, though. It's a premise a number of people operate on currently in game, but it's generally done as a cooperative venture among trusted partners, since there's no way of making someone stick to their promises. You need to depend on their sense of honor, and their enthusiasm for the project.

Since the group accounts are set up to pay any accumulated cash out equally to all members, they cannot be used as a method of building up capital, except in the form of group owned objects and land (and thus subject to taxes). However, they are very useful if you've got a few members of the group who are making money one week, and wish to support their fellow group members by donating.

I looked into the banking idea a while back and there is one way that loans could be enforced: The bank would hold the land of the borrower as collateral. Unfortunately, the extreme tax rates on land mean that any landowner is essentially paying for the land all over again every four weeks, and any loan that depended on land to guarantee its value would have to have a 25% WEEKLY interest rate. This is just too high to ever be workable.

So, long story short, if you want to make money or build a big project, friendship, trust and enthusiasm are your real tools. They work, too!

I heartily second this sentiment, Cubey.

Unless banking in SL is something that is Linden-regulated, I strongly doubt I will ever be participating in it. Additionally, I would hope the Leon Guillaume banking incident taught people not to trust random players who make promises and then vanish with your Lindenbucks.

Regulation is the real deal / deal breaker. In the real world there is banking regulations. All those junk mail credit apps I get are required to list specific information about the account. If the bank goes under or something happens I am fairly assured that my money in my checking account isn't lost. The lindens can not possibly be expected to offer this kind of support and pretection on an individual basis. Therefor they must put the tools in place for the security to be automated before it will succeed.

And as much as I like my contract system, I'm not sure that it really supports banking.