I don’t really understand what you mean. Isn’t ‘in the business of borrowing short-term and lending long-term’ like half the definition of a bank? The other hal

I don’t really understand what you mean. Isn’t ‘in the business of borrowing short-term and lending long-term’ like half the definition of a bank? The other half being that they are licensed by the state to do this short-term borrowing, get state guarantees for deposits, and have to follow a bunch of regulations making them almost an instrument of the state. It feels to me like saying that evictions wouldn’t be a thing if we simply didn’t allow tenancies. I roughly believe that if you gave people the choice between paying to store money in ‘cash but it’s a number in a database’ (ie the thing you describe) and investing it in some kind of ‘not a bank’ where they can earn interest and withdraw when they please but the big pot of money is loaned out, there might not be runs of the ‘bank’, but there would likely be runs of the ‘not a bank’.