‘The first question is a good one and explains the enormous efforts in making a currency difficult to counterfeit. The tech wave of the last 40 years have made it possible for counterfeiters to create currency that was undetectable from the real thing. So a counter effort in technology was required. And today our US currency looks quite different that it did 20 years or even 10 years ago.’
Another plus for gold is you can’t really counterfeit it, unlike paper money the world over. Second, politicians can debase our currency at any time. Do you, after the last few years, trust them not to?
There are still many negatives for gold and your insinuation that gold is not easy to counterfeit is not true.
Aristotle himself under pressure of losing his position devised a way to tell if gold bars were solid gold or not. Even today gold bars are not pure and the question is always how pure are they. There is some tech available to help answer these questions but the tech is cumbersome and difficult to commercialize.
Then there are problems of lugging around gold to use as money for daily commerce. It’s not practical. So paper currency can be gold backed which is a good step but has its downside as well.
The wealth of society is in so much more than a gold backed currency. The USA has so much more in resources than it does in just a gold hoard. Drill Baby Drill in the Bakken proves yellow gold is irrelevant; black gold is where it’s at.
Still a gold standard is commendable and was the standard designd by early America founding visionaries.
But gold itself is a mirage. What would make gold have value in a gold backed currency is the ‘force’ behind it, not the gold itself, it’s just a yellow metal.
The value of a currency lies in the ‘force’ behind it and more pertinently the character, properties and attributes of that force. Is it benevolent? Is it repressive? Is it attractive? Is the society that the ‘force’ is joined to an attractive society?
The Global Currency Reset, a ‘big idea’ discussed in world banking forums and government panels was supposed to happen this month. It was supposed to happen last year. It never happens because it requires an international agreement of all nations to value their currencies based on the national balance sheets and income statements. This effort has spun off myriad games in the financial world including historical defunct bonds from a 100 years ago to offset current ledgers etc. It was supposedly waiting for a final signoff on the Iraqi Dinar but we have seen that it’s possible Iraq may not even exist in the next months as it fractures and burns.
It is interesting to watch it all cycle through.
In the meantime, for the moment anyways, my ‘gold’ is in holding and occasionally consuming a bottle of Ex Umbris from Owen-Roe Vineyards and Winery, a Syrah from the Yakima Valley. Then add a view of the sea, the Olympic Mountain skyline, a backdrop of peace, serenity, warm friends and family and great great value is created, very competitive with gold bars.
http://www.wine-searcher.com/wine-26412-0001-owen-roe-ex-umbris-syrah-yakima-valley-usa