tamcharles
I personally can't see it taking flight, unless of course the admins run it. There are trust issues and more importantly, it requires investors to vend/exchange/invest other peoples money for a bit of commission. Most of whom that are capable of this (and can make a worthy profit) would rather do it for themselves (as they already have the capital).
Basically the take home message is my opinion that, "everyone should do their own homework."
confused And our Gaian society is stratified for a reason.
sweatdrop xd yeah, true. True. Poor people who bump/poll for gold. In my theories I figured that trust would be a large issue, as most people who work for their gold would hate to see it sudenly all be gone through scamming. However, if you look at the first attempt at a Gaian Bank:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6596886(It failed.)
You see a couple things. Frist, the rules are really bad. There's a cap on how much you can deposit, the rules are confusing, and you can lose your money if you forget about it. On top of that, loans won't workk unless there is a way to garentee againt scamming, which is probably not going to happen. The next thing that is apparent is that is is newbies that are depositing money, which means that is the newbie engine that would be using the bank, which means (generaly) that they would be mainly depositing gold untill thety've saved up quite a bit and they can afford whatever item they were saving up for. Also, it means that they can be drawn by interest and compelled a bit more not to withdraw gold.
Most of the people who will read this consider 3K quite incosiquential, but there's a post in BSOP saying, "OMG! 3K!?!", which suggests that that person would be rather excited to get 500 a month on a 5K investment, especialy if it meant that they wouldn't have to do any work for it. I recently did a poll in BSOP (Big Suites of Polls, second largest guild) and most people answering had 1-10K. The previous Bank did very little to appeal to the masses, and so it didn't get very many deposits. Also, because it had a limit on the size of the deposit, it wasn't able to get large amounts of cash, which would be helpful if you were going to use the Bank like a hedge fund.
That's, I think, a pretty important idea in this theory. Even though the objective would be to make money by buying and selling like a mutual fund, unlike a mutual fund, if even though the bank was making a profit, the profit would not be tied to the amount given out. The bank could double its money and it would still only pay out 10%. It would be as if the bank was giving the people a commision for the ability to use their money.
The point about the hiring investors is well taken. That's easily the biggest obstical to a bank being viable. The only idea I can think of to get around it would be for there to be different jobs, an accountant, and a person in charge of investments. There could probably be only one investor, as more than one might start fighting and bickering and embezling and quiting as they don't have much of a stake in the bank. other than limiting the Bank to only one investor, there doesn't seem to be much of a way around that.