[eru]

Sure, it's good to be wary. Though even blaming any crises at the end of free banking episodes, still seems to leave a pretty good track record overall.

As an aside:

Reading about how free banking can automatically can adjust the amount of bank money created over eg a fixed amount of gold to keep nominal GDP stable even in the face of eg increased demands for holding money from the general population, made me much more sympathetic to bitcoin's fixed supply than I'd been before. Since some kind of inflation, price level or nGDP targeting seemed like a good idea for a currency regime, and I could only assume that bitcoin was bound to fail before.

Of course, the mechanism George Selgin describes don't necessarily have to work that way. But at least it's something that looks plausible.