You are making a straw man argument. I am not an idealist.
Every asset (housing, stocks, gold, etc) has cycles and bear markets so again you are making a non argument.
You deny being an idealist, then make a moral judgment that only a ideological purist would make!
The reality is that fractional reserve banking is like economic steroids: economies that utilize it outgrow and outcompete those that do not. Of course there are downsides, but overall the pros would seem to outweigh the cons.
My point was not really to defend fractional reserve banking per se (it is a flawed system, as I readily admitted) but to emphasize the futility of adhering to any sort of utopian ideology, economic or political. The reality is that whatever "perfect" system you can dream up will eventually be abused and exploited by the individuals who achieve preeminent power in said system (as the people who rise to the top of any competitive hierarchy are disproportionately psychopathic). In others words, the problem is not really the design of a given system, the problem is human nature itself, and the evil within men's hearts that drives them lie, cheat, steal and kill in service of their greed and ambition.
Another straw man argument. Of course every system is open to a degree of abuse but some systems are more vulnerable than others. When the world was on a classical gold standard wars were less frequent and shorter, governments were smaller and deficits were smaller. A bitcoin standard system would not be perfect and there would be ways of abusing it but it would have less vulnerabilities than a fiat system. Nobody is talking about a utopia but if we can get some kind of incremental improvement on what we have now that is a win.
You do this frequently. Latch on to a point that's not really related to what the topic of conversation is, and then link some other idea with it. Pointing out that banks are less than ideal, if not criminal, makes one an "extremist libertarian"? In what world?
No it's not. That's in fact the entire issue, because it has implications on what people do with, and how they relate to, money. Arguably the most important topic in life because it affects the average man's behavior so much.
We're just talking about money, not some overarching "system."
Yes. I find it bizarre that scorpion constantly touts fiat systems, which are inherently immoral. Say what you want about BTC, and we have a lot, but it is fundamentally honest and moral (as money) due to its design and trustless, permissionless features.
I admittedly don't understand any aspect of this except as a trade and/or connections to other people, such as "friends of the administration". No other coin is actually money, and all of them have ICOs with founders already pre-mining. Since BTC has won, all of the other coins are just distractions, or at best, businesses that could sell some technology to others for a fee. The problem with even that is that you can just copy all other projects on the base layer of payment (BTC). Since I don't play alts, ultimately I have no risk and no real opinion. I'd rather just leverage BTC at certain trading times, like now with MSTR.
I'm just going to give you my humble opinion, I was an XRP holder, I bought at 0.21 cents in 2020, and sold most of it in 2021 because of the fundamentals, the lawsuit, and the obnoxious XRP army community (worse than the bitcoin maxis), and it is pretty shady too, the way they dump on their holders and their dealings with central institutions. I prefer XLM which is the alternative for the same narrative of ''bridging banks and tradfi financial system with crypto'' and it has more upside potential.