Oh please. the way banknotes started in the first place is merchants wanted to store their gold at a bank, rather than lugging it around themselves or setting up their own fort and small militia to protect it. Then they were issued a piece of paper, a banknote. When the bankers discovered people were using the banknotes like money, they discovered a way to loan people paper and run a fractional reserve. It doesn't matter what medium you use as money. Someone is going to find a way to put them self in the middle and exact their usurious fees. Or just plain use force or stealth and outright steal your bounty.
Interestingly, the first technology to be developed since the advent of fractional reserve banking that actually has a real chance of putting a stop to most of the double counting of reserve assets is... drum-roll...
blockchain!Except not even exchanges are currently using that "feature".
Thanks to blockchain exchanges could be already guaranteeing they don't run fractional reserve. It would be as simple as this:
- Every exchange user is given a "unique private identifier".
- Every day, the exchange publish a balance sheet that comprises a listing of all UPI's and its individual balances. The total is the minimum amount of reserves the exchange must control to prove absence of fractional reserve "banking".
- Simultaneously the exchange publish a listing of addresses which individual balances (can be checked on their respective blockchains for accuracy) sum, at least, the total needed. Obviously they sign a timestamped code with those addresses to prove ownership.
- Individual users could check their balances are included and accounted for in the balance sheet.
... But not a single one exchange is still doing this. Wonder why.....
Because since fiat reserves cannot be verified in this manner, you're going through all this trouble to only verify 50% of your reserves. Meaning they can still theoretically run 50% fractional reserve but now you'd have that warm comforting feeling that those number mean something that they really don't.
Being able to verify they are not running fractional reserve on crypto alone would be a great advantage. Also, FIAT funds can be proved by a signed and stamped bank statement. It could be forged yeah.... but, anyways, the FIAT reserves of the exchanges, being stored in bank accounts, are ALREADY being subject to fractional reserve by the banks itself
Do you really not think an exchange that proofs daily that they have all the crypto they are suppossed to have would not be a big improvement to current system?
I'm an exchange, you deposit
BTC100 with me and r0ach deposits his 2643940 shekels. I buy a lambo i mean get "hacked" for
BTC50. I go to another exchange and purchase
BTC50 with roaches 1321970 shekels. And at the end of the day i can still provide verifiable proof that i hold
BTC100 which corresponds to my balance sheet. Yay for false sense of security!! Partial audits are pretty useless. Now this possibly could work on those crypto only exchanges, that's the future we hope to have one day
Edit: Oh and i also go to another bank and take a loan out for 1321970 shekels, and deposit it in the first bank and provide a legit statement of the full 2643940 shekels in the first bank. Never mind my 1321970 shekel liability to the 2nd bank. Unfortunately fiat is untraceable thats why all the drug cartels, pimps, and war lords use it, would be awesome to replace it with something better