Folks need to stop making careless comparisons between stablecoins and the “free-banking era” of the 1830s. In the free-banking era, local banks were able to issue notes in far-flung territories of the United States. They ran into trouble when the notes were backed by weak collateral, like low-grade railroad bonds and remote land bonds. The system was drastically inefficient, in part because redemptions required you to physically return to the local bank. This meant some notes traded at steep discounts depending on their distance from the issuing point, and merchants needed to maintain giant books of reference pricing across thousands of non-standardized individual notes. None of these things apply to stablecoins. In the Genius Act, there are strict limits on the assets they hold, redemptions can be made daily from anywhere, and stablecoin prices will trade on exchanges allowing instant convertibility and price discovery. State-regulated stablecoins are size limited ($10b cap), which means they’ll be a vanishing fraction of the market, and are generally subject to the same asset holding and redemption provisions as the federally regulated stablecoins that will make up 95%+ of the market. I like analogies. They can be helpful in understanding things. But they have to be reasonable. Comparisons to the free-banking era -- which started 188 years ago, when letters moved on horseback and Samuel Morse was still tinkering with the telegraph in the lab -- are not reasonable.