Nick Szabo  🔑

I don't think fractional reserve itself is unethical (if the customers are aware of it), but its ability to survive should be put to the test on a free market of banking, not a central banking system.

Maybe fractional reserve works to a certain point, maybe not, maybe it would work in some situations but not in others, the market would find out, but it can't, because there is no market right now, just a central bank backed oligopoly.

@NickSzabo4 writes a lot about free banking, tagging him if he wants to add anything.

Free banking history helped inspire my design of bit gold, but mostly as "what people really wanted at the end of the day was the gold, the bank note [today could be digital cash] was merely an IOU for gold. So how do I make the actual money, the gold, in digital form?

From that POV, the basic problem with free banking is that for various reasons banks convinced people to swap their trust-minimized silver and gold for trust-based gold IOUs. Fractional reserve and modern fiat are both consequences of that misplaced trust.

So I set myself the challenge of using my computer science knowledge to design a trust-minimized form of digital money, and the result was bit gold.

I hoped such money would be convenient enough that economies would return to vulnerability-minimized money. We still see the trust-the-convenient-exchange vs. hold-your-own debate today, but Bitcoin gives us a better chance to minimize the vulnerability of money than gold did.