good point. Although currency can be backed by assets other than money (gold, silver, etc.) it can be backed by land, productive assets, and other assets.

Right, jb. Required reading.

Mints do not have to be owned or operated by any government agency. Worldwide, the vast majority of mints are private business enterprises. Even in the US there are a number of highly respected private mints, the "Franklin Mint" being one of the better known ones.

Agreed with your initial comment to this topic. Still have to make time to thoughly read and digest the article.

We now have the worst of all legally established banking worlds. Private banksters printing legal tender from nothing for personal gain at the expense of the economy/market as a whole.
Instead of being legalized as it has over the past 101 years, this practice should be a felony with penalties similar to treason.

I'd much prefer dozens of currencies with backing by things of value, and independently rated and trackable on public internet. Fractional Reserve Banking of legal tender is intolerable and should be banned.

Just goes to show how complicated the government has made the whole subject of money. No wonder we have allowed the politicians to manipulate things so much that we have periodic "crises" without even understanding what happened. We need to stop our government from affecting the money supply and its value- PERIOD. Otherwise we will wind up like Venezuela or Russia

Both money and currencies (receipts for money) are created spontaneously by the market and require no (coercive) "authority". Government authority cannot create money, it can only create currencies. The only purpose for coercive currencies is to create a platform for fraud.

Central banking and FRB are not the same, but most central banks use fractional reserve banking (FRB). Part of the Gulch reading list should be Edward G. Griffin's "The Creature from Jekyll Island", which describes all of the various FRB and central banking schemes over centuries - and debunks them all.

Typically, coining money is done by a mint. In the case of the U.S., the U.S. Mint. It would be distributed thusly: miners take ore to the refiners; from there to the mint; the mint makes coinage to return to the owners (miners, in this case), keeping a portion to pay the costs of minting; the owners invest in their chosen projects with coins or deposit the coins in a bank for interest and the banks loan the coins to borrowers at a slighly higher rate than the savings rate. Now, as capital increases, paper is useful for many transactions to reduce the cost of handling the bullion and coins - commercial paper - not fiat currency. Modern times would use debits and credits through electronic transfers if encrypting and security were developed to handle it without excessive costs. In a small community, like the Gulch, the coins are enough with Midas' bank being the central repository - like a swap meet, or central market.

While you are correct that as a matter of semantic precision the two are not synonymous, they must nevertheless be viewed as two sides of the same coin (is there a pun in here?) in that in practice they both exist to create fraudulent currency out of thin air. Where they differ is a) that CB is a priori coercive while FRB is not and b) While this is not true in practice, CB could at least theoretically remain honest and 'value agnostic' if rigidly tied to a money commodity (gold being the historically most reliable one), while FRB ('lending' fictitious checkbook currency) is by its very nature criminal fraud. In practice they are therefore both harmful to society.

Without FRBs it would be very difficult for most people to access capital.

Central banks are not part of a free market, so I would say they are always harmful. A perfectly run central bank at best would give the same results that a free market would give.

FRBs are part of the free market and eliminating them would be devastating for the economy.

I don't see that either is necessarily harmful, but central banking leads to cronyism and too little competition with the banks. At least our central bank is privately owned; I'm sure the problem is worse in places where it isn't.

Are we speaking of a central bank in concept, or a central bank for the United States of America? If the former, the key problem is that it becomes a political tool (but what that the government does, does not become politicized?) If the latter, the big issue is that it is not authorized under the constitution. Of which central bank is this discussion, please?

Central Bankng is always harmful. In that,I agree with the author here. However, while FRB should not be banned, merely disclosed, I am not a fan of FRB.