How often do you hear of someone loosing thousands of dollars perminantly because of a banking error? Almost never, because if a bank did not reimburse people who lost money, their reputation would be destroyed. How often do you hear of people losing thousands of dollars because of a cryptocurrency? All the time, because no one is responsible for the lost money, so no one will replace it or work extra hard to ensure it is safe. Security doesn't matter when you have a central authority dedicated to ensuring you don't loose your money, and which had been successfully doing so for decades.

What does this first sentence even mean?

I translated it as "if there is a market opportunity for there being a private, ethereum-backed federal reserve, one will emerge."

the federal government can reimburse the person I was replying to because they control and mint dollars. With Ethereum you can control and mint your own currency, I didn't want to use the word currency earlier, it is more of a digital asset or app credits.