The current Market
There are 3 ways of storing Bitcoins at this moment.
1: Personal Wallet
The basic way of storing Bitcoins. Save it encrypted or not on a hard drive or USB and pay/receive Bitcoins with your personal wallet adress.
2: Online Wallet
In principle the same as a personal wallet only now it is stored by a third party online.
3: Exchange Site
Exchange sites hold accounts which can store Bitcoins or regular currency (such as USD). Allowing quick exchange of these currencies.
All options have it's pro's and cons. Either you are dependent on your own hardware or on some third party, which are most of the time located in foreign countries. If you store your Bitcoins "hot", meaning on a computer with internet access, you will be at risk of hackers stealing your Bitcoins. But when you store them offline on, for example: a seperate USB drive ("cold") you stand the risk of losing this USB drive and lose all your Bitcoins.
Closest to our innovation is Bitcoin-Central. Bitcoin-Central acts like a bank, issuing debit and accepting payments in BTC and real money. It is however not a bank nor a payment service provider (PSP). What Bitcoin-Central did was partner up with an outside bank and a registrered PSP. This allowed them to provide payment services and all balance saved in Euros are insured. It could however not credit money nor invest it's clients money. [2]
The biggest risk at the moment for Bitcoin holdings, is of hackers. There are many attempts, some of them succesfull, on servers that store or trade Bitcoins. Bitcoins are traceable, but the adress cannot be linked to a specific person. So stolen Bitcoins cannot be retreived. Banking have the know how and capacity to secure their servers from potential hackers.
"Do you also want the benefits from using bitcoins but don't want to bear the risk?"
The Bitcoin bank is an addition to the public banking sector and e-banking. It should not be a purely Bitcoin based bank due to the financial risks with the volatile exchange rate. Our innovation is aimed to be used by banks to provide their consumers an extra service. Client's Bitcoins saved in the Bitcoin bank are open for investing by the bank thus opens the possibility for clients to earn interest on their savings.
What we are still missing....
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