I was talking yesterday with a professional trader that has more than 20 years experience trading debt instruments and other assets with some of the major banking institutions in my country. She asked me what was going on with the bitcoin crash, as I am "the bitcoin guy". I told her that basically there was too much leverage and those bets went belly up, so she told me something like: -- but leverage is how every single trade is done! -- yeah, but in the case of bitcoin you have to sell those BTC in order to avoid defaulting the loan, this is not like banks, you MUST have those BTC, there are no bailouts -- but banks also have the money -- oh no, when you take a loan with a bank, they don't need to have all the money they loan to you! -- off course they do ! -- ... eeh no, not really it's called fractional reserve

Imagine this is a professional trader that doesn't have the least idea about what fractional reserve banking is! She can perform her job perfectly without knowing that. Most people in the world are simply not aware about how fractional reserve works, or how much leverage there is on many of those bets that are supposed to be backed by countries. Sovereign defaults will be a very hard awakening for many.