I disagree. Modern banking is highly integrated with modern money. Its true that P2P banking solutions like zopa can take a lot more of the money-lending market, but that ignores the really important role of banks, which is to lend money into existence though the fraudulent fractional reserve mechanism. If we don’t borrow money from banks there won’t be any money except the coins issued by government.

Unless the government starts issuing money, the way of this is for us to issue other forms of credit to each other. But local or niche currencies have a very hard time competing against national currencies, regardless of usability.

We need to be much more courageous in developing and using alternatives to commercially produced debt money, especially because they are trying to make these things illegal.