[nickpsecurity]

There seems to be a disconnect between the real world and Bitcoin write-ups. Reliability of currency, security of accounts, service, and so on is great at many banks with the negatives mostly happening at the greedier ones. There's also groups like credit unions. These currently have fewer problems than solutions like Bitcoin outside fees for processing, forex, etc.

Interesting enough, the fees are only a small percentage of many's revenue. They could be greatly reduced or even eliminated while the bank would remain profitable. A non-profit bank chartered to keep things no higher than X% would do fine. Procedural issues and incentives might be dealt with there to where possible to align bank's values with stakeholders.

I'm fine with research in distributed banking and such. I'm not for pretending current banks have problems they don't or ignoring straight-forward solutions where applicable. The centralized model with distributed checks is best for banking. Traditional currency is fine and governments would fight alternatives anyway. So, best to leverage and improve the proven model in the interim until P2P models solve their many problems. Side benefit: one could help many small businesses and poor people that way potentially.