But it remains the case that central bankers, academics, and politicians are tempted by the specious parallels between stablecoins and wildcat banks, as sometimes unreliable private issuers of notes into circulation. I don’t strictly blame them because the similarities are apparent on the surface level. However, in so doing, they rely on a fictionalized history of free banking, one that omits the very real success stories in Scotland and Canada, confuses the root causes for the instability of the American episode, and overstates the significance and prevalence of “wildcat” banks. Genuine laissez-faire banking is worth studying as a testament to the power of markets and incentives to create stable financial conditions with no central authority. Everyone in the crypto sector should be aware of it. And central bankers, though they may not like the implications of the historical record, have no excuse.