I'm sympathetic to this view, it's not however clear to me whether free banking on top of gold was a solution to the technical limitations of the time and if it would make sense on top of Bitcoin (yes it's slow, but still much much faster and cheaper than transferring gold was) Are there any more structured opinions on this that anyone knows?

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Read Lyn Alden to understand why gold failed and how bitcoin solves those problems. Gold settlement was too slow, risky, and hard to verify. The telegraph made physical settlement obsolete and centralized gold reserves. Gold is physical so it is vulnerable to capture by whoever has the biggest guns. The government simply captured the centralized gold reserves and forced everyone onto a fiat standard. This is what will happen to all the ETFs, exchanges, and treasury companies. Saylor's bitcoin will be the national reserve. History rhymes.
Yup, read Lyn Alden's book, too. My big takeaway was the impedance mismatch between clearing (telegraph) and settlement (gold) is the root of instability. Fixed with ecash and bitcoin. Lightning Network is the telegraph , Cashu is the IOU and Bitcoin is the gold.