Chequing accounts (non-interest-bearing accounts, used primarily for their other conveniences) are an instance of a bank providing a (traditionally) not-bank service.
Basically, chequing accounts (and all their features: cheques, wire transfers, EFTs, cross-bank ATM withdrawal, etc.) are forms of remittance: a service where a group of people get together and agree to maintain an 'eventually-consistent' balance-sheet between them. Alice goes to one member branch of the remittance group and gives them $N (plus a transfer fee $F) to send to Bob, who may be anywhere else. Bob goes to a different member branch and gets his $N. $N is transferred from the pool to the branch Bob went to to cover their loss, and then $F is split between the group.
Remittance has never really been a function you would expect a "bank" to provide until quite modern times; banks tended to be single-branch, holding the deposits of the people who put them in that bank. You could get someone else's deposits from a bank if they had them turned into a bank note and gave that note to you, but to withdraw it, you'd have to go to that bank. (Greenbacks--federal bank-notes--were a clear innovation from this system. Imagine, a system so bad for holding and transferring value that "cash" is an improvement!)
When a bank temporarily ran out money to cover its outstanding liabilities (withdrawals), it didn't ask to be paid from some pool--it just took out a loan with a neighboring bank. (This still happens, and it's the basis of one of the very important numbers in Macroeconomics: LIBOR--the London Inter-Bank Exchange Rate, which measures the average interest banks will ask for when giving out those bank-to-bank loans, and which is built into the base of pretty much any other loan interest rate you might look at.)
Eventually, though, wire transfers plugged banks directly into one-another's balance sheets in a way they weren't before, and banks could suddenly outcompete all the traditional remittance providers because, unlike the remittance providers, they already had pretty much the whole population of each city/town they served as members. It's like Google suddenly realizing they could do ads when they already had so many eyeballs specifically looking for things to purchase online: it went from "fun idea" to "main money-maker" in the span of a few years.
But that still doesn't mean that that's what it means to be a bank, or that Bitcoin "banks" make any sense. Bitcoin remittance providers, sure--but nobody ever figured it was a good idea to keep their savings with a remittance provider ;)
Basically, chequing accounts (and all their features: cheques, wire transfers, EFTs, cross-bank ATM withdrawal, etc.) are forms of remittance: a service where a group of people get together and agree to maintain an 'eventually-consistent' balance-sheet between them. Alice goes to one member branch of the remittance group and gives them $N (plus a transfer fee $F) to send to Bob, who may be anywhere else. Bob goes to a different member branch and gets his $N. $N is transferred from the pool to the branch Bob went to to cover their loss, and then $F is split between the group.
Remittance has never really been a function you would expect a "bank" to provide until quite modern times; banks tended to be single-branch, holding the deposits of the people who put them in that bank. You could get someone else's deposits from a bank if they had them turned into a bank note and gave that note to you, but to withdraw it, you'd have to go to that bank. (Greenbacks--federal bank-notes--were a clear innovation from this system. Imagine, a system so bad for holding and transferring value that "cash" is an improvement!)
When a bank temporarily ran out money to cover its outstanding liabilities (withdrawals), it didn't ask to be paid from some pool--it just took out a loan with a neighboring bank. (This still happens, and it's the basis of one of the very important numbers in Macroeconomics: LIBOR--the London Inter-Bank Exchange Rate, which measures the average interest banks will ask for when giving out those bank-to-bank loans, and which is built into the base of pretty much any other loan interest rate you might look at.)
Eventually, though, wire transfers plugged banks directly into one-another's balance sheets in a way they weren't before, and banks could suddenly outcompete all the traditional remittance providers because, unlike the remittance providers, they already had pretty much the whole population of each city/town they served as members. It's like Google suddenly realizing they could do ads when they already had so many eyeballs specifically looking for things to purchase online: it went from "fun idea" to "main money-maker" in the span of a few years.
But that still doesn't mean that that's what it means to be a bank, or that Bitcoin "banks" make any sense. Bitcoin remittance providers, sure--but nobody ever figured it was a good idea to keep their savings with a remittance provider ;)