I agree with you up to a point. It's true that you need custodians on a gold standard, which is one of many reasons that bitcoin is superior money to gold. You are also right that fractional reserve banking is an assumption for this article. But, for all its faults, a gold backed fractional reserve system was superior to the purely debt based fractional system we have today.

If Stacker News existed in the 1800s, and we all wrote each other letters, we would all be gold bugs.