So am I correct to assume that ripple is designed to allow fractional reserve banking at the gateways?
I think this will happen:
- 1000 users at a gateway will deposit 10 BTC each and extend trust over 10BTC to said gateway.
- The gateway should hold 10000 BTC to cover the trust.
- The gateway will monitor how many BTC are withdrawn and deposited per day over time, say 1000 BTC
- The gateway will only keep 2000 BTC on hand.
So we have 2000 real bitcoins that back 10000 ripple-BTC-IOUs and this will work until there is a bank-run on the gateway at which point the gateway can't pay up and the people will start revoking their trust.
I think this is correct.
However it is not unreasonable to expect that there will be a competitive market in gateways. One of the selling point will be the advertised reserve ratio and its auditability (easy with BTC). Other ones will be the fees and general reputation/trustworthiness of the entity.
I'm thinking of this:
Free Banking
Free banking refers to a monetary arrangement in which banks are subject to no special regulations beyond those applicable to most enterprises, and in which they also are free to issue their own paper currency (banknotes). In a free banking system, market forces control the supply of total quantity of banknotes and deposits that can be supported by any given stock of cash reserves, where such reserves consist either of a scarce commodity (such as gold) or of an artificially limited stock of "fiat" money issued by a central bank. In the strictest versions of free banking, however, there either is no role at all for a central bank, or the supply of central bank money is supposed to be permanently "frozen." There is, therefore, no agency capable of serving as a "lender of last resort" in the usually understood sense of the term. Nor is there any government insurance of banknotes or bank deposit accounts.
sounds good to me. free market for banks.