Though a petty analogy, it's far better that the "bitcoin bank" fail than to receive a bailout from the government. Amen?
I have to apologize, I think I have hijacked this thread, but I think at this point it doesn't matter to the OP.
In the real world, Yes and no. It depends on how much you value a aristocratic economy over a equal access credit based one. I think a lot of people in the real world have forgotten what banks should do, this includes the banks themselves. One of the problems with banks, is they no longer serve the community, by this I mean, the large for profit banks, have to charge fees when they catch someone making a mistake - and everyone makes a mistake, so most people who have interacted with a bank would like to see the banks fail. However, if you view the bank as a necessary part of any large scale credit based economy, then banks serve a few critical purposes. Everything regarding banks has been twisted around in the last 20 years or so with the merging of wealth management banks with community banks. But, I don't see a way back when loan interest rates seem to permanently below 6-8%.
My personal opinion, is banks serve a very important moral purpose, and need to be supported. In a credit based economy, banks are critical to the movement of money. Support can come from individuals, community, capital markets and a central bank; generally in that order. Access to credit is actually the great equalizer in our modern world. At a certain point in the development of an economy, when a few entities have accumulated large amounts of capital, only the very rich would stay rich, since they would be the only ones able to expand their businesses, and use their capital to buy or undercut any capital poor folks who tried to compete (at least until the competition fails). An entity here can be an individual, company, family, etc, basically a closed group.
It would have been very nice to see the big miners or supporters of bitcoin, step in and support the honest banks. I am not advocating any bitcoin banks modeled after pure western banking due to the insufficient loss statistics and lack of efficient recovery mechanisms(debt collection). For various legal or other reasons, at this time the bitcoin world can't support a bank using capital markets or a central bank.
