Or, put alternately, it taints actual fractional reserve banking (which has worked pretty well for hundreds of years) with a sense of being the same kind of shady business practice as this. (Which may be the point of the comparison, given the ideological bent of many Bitcoin advocates.)
i don't get how you can loan bitcoins in any other way other than full reserve - unless you somehow put trust into the bank (which you have to for fiat money, but for bitcoins, you can verify and so don't have to trust credit/notes offered by the lender).
Same way you don't get back the exact serial-numbered dollars you loan (deposit) to a bank. It's not the _identity_ of the bitcoin which matters, it's the value.
If you want a lockbox, get a lockbox. If you want a deposit account, you're storing and retrieving fully fungible and interchangeable entities.
And it's worth remembering that banks aren't the only institutions that make loans. There are a lot of businesses that extend credit (post-paid services, invoicing with net 60 terms, etc), which has the same exact macroeconomic effect.
Probably only the sort of fractional-reserve banking in which the banker lends out for a year or 30 deposits accepted under the promise to return them upon demand. That's the sort that can have bank runs. If depositors agree that their money is locked up for a while, no problem.
