# Dirt Road Digest #0

By [Transnature.](https://paragraph.com/@transnature) · 2024-02-04

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原文：

[https://dirtroads.substack.com/p/dirt-roads-a-manifesto](https://dirtroads.substack.com/p/dirt-roads-a-manifesto)

银行的任务：

> The name of the game is to minimize the cost of borrowing while maximizing the loan yield, avoiding too many bad surprises.

基础设施：

> In order to achieve this badge of convenience banks need to invest a lot of money in infrastructure (to offer a quick and reliable way for its clients to deposit, withdraw, and manage their cash) and in the creation of trust(The most important).

建立信任：

> In order to get the license of trust from the relevant authorities, the ultimate owners of the bank need to put skin in the game in the form of appearances and equity capital, a cushion that will absorb those unexpected losses arising from lending money and running operations.
> 
> Trust is a fundamental aspect of what a bank is, hence a bank should focus its resources to guarantee absolute trust at the expense of anything else

银行的本质：

> A bank is just a group of people smart enough to lend money for a good risk-adjusted return, and with enough financial and reputational cushion to gain all the badges of approval required in order to access common people’s money almost for free. And all this supported by an expensive, and often archaic, infrastructure.

### Bank V1: Internalize

对game失去控制导致银行越来越不透明

> In our times banks have traditionally extended their activities in fields that do not pertain to their core competence. This was due to two main reasons: their difficulty to effectively control those activities (remember, trust is a fundamental aspect of what a bank is, hence a bank should focus its resources to guarantee absolute trust at the expense of anything else), and an innate desire to extract rents by leveraging their market position. All those non-core activities could be listed along a spectrum that goes from **_guarantee_**\* **trust**\* to **_extract_**\* **rent**\*.

Ex :

> Banks have traditionally fully internalized the process of lending funds to customers, from product design, pricing, underwriting (what is the likelihood that she or he is going to repay me in part or in full), recovery (how can I get the money back). There is no particular reason a bank should internalize this full process; the internalization happened because banks wanted to have full control over whom they were giving depositors’ money to, but also because they wanted to extract as much profit as possible from this activity by doing it themselves and for their own clients.
> 
> You put your money as guarantee to run banking operations, have to swallow a lot of uncertainty and volatility without really understanding what goes on under the hood, and that investment returns you 5.4% a year. Not great, especially when you compare it to 26.2% of the Eurostoxx Index for the same period.

远景：

> It is my conviction that they ultimately will, and that a bank will go back being what a bank is at the core: a trustable and knowledgable group of people taking other people’s money (securely) and lending those funds to a selected group of businesses and individuals, **_while themselves bearing the risk of making mistakes_**. This combination of wisdom, experience, and commingled incentives, will be the last bit to be automatized.

### Bank V2: Externalize

> It became obvious that banks do a bad job in several of those non-core activities:
> 
> *   It appeared clear they were **too creative** in trying to find ways to boost their returns by investing their own capital, or by selling aggressively their products and services to their clients
>     
> *   It appeared obvious they were **gloriously** **ineffective at creating and managing their IT infrastructure** when compared to tech giants
>     
> *   And ultimately they emerged in no way fit to innovate their product offering in order to **keep up with the diverse and always evolving needs** of their individual and business clients
>     
> 
> Those new players haven’t learned the lessons either, and each is trying to expand its footprint vertically to incorporate upstream or downstream what banks used to do.

银行&借贷(.etc)平台的互补：

> Instead of directly engaging clients by developing internally a series of (necessarily generic) products, a bank could select a specialized lender to partner with. Specialized lenders have better knowledge of a specific segment and are more flexible to develop the customer experience, and as a consequence **they can extract higher risk-adjusted returns via more targeted offerings — and not by providing riskier loans**. Specialized lenders, on the other hand, **lack the deep pockets (i.e. the access to the deposits) that a bank has** thanks to that trust badge, and they do not necessarily have the expertise and right incentives to keep the quality of their borrowers in check

### Bank V3 :Decentralizing trust

> We are at the infancy of the DeFi industry, with great ideas lost under the storm of speculation. We don’t really know the projects that will succeed and those that will succumb to fate, human flaws, or lack of adoption, but it is my conviction that DeFi is here to stay. Banks, especially those built from scratch, should see this as an opportunity to go back being (and being remunerated for) something closer to what they should be: a group of people leveraging their skills in securing cheap sources of funding while looking for promising high-returning projects where to deploy those same funds.

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*Originally published on [Transnature.](https://paragraph.com/@transnature/dirt-road-digest-0)*