One basic problem with gold/silver currency for governments is that the wealth becomes detached from any national government or its policies; crossing borders with those metals makes you wealthy in any country.
With hundreds of trillions in unfunded liabilities, and trillions more in undisciplined spending, our government is taxing using the “back door” of inflation and currency devaluation.
Until we can spend only what we tax our dollars will be worth less tomorrow than they are today.
Tie the dollar back to gold. It will be painful, more than taking the parents credit card back from the teenager, but it is necessary.
You can send all your worthless $20's and $50's to me. I'll dispose of them for you.
Our money has no inherent value...only what we ascribe to it.
That goes for dollars, rials, euros, pesos, any money at all.
It has become how we can spend spend spend with no repercussions as along as people will continue to believe in their value. I do not know that it has to be “backed” by anything at all.
Cyber currencies such as bitcoin are extensions of that idea: they are simply imaginary based on following a set rituals based on nothing.
Maybe the Chinese have stumbled onto something: Money will mean nothing and your basic needs will be provided. Your wealth and value,though, will be your social rating score.
That will be true government control.
“Gold is heavy - hard to carry around.”
Not this %%+&@ again.
Do electric cars use less energy and therefore pollute less than gasoline cars? It's easy to determine. Add up the total cost of ownership. If it is more, they are using more energy. The same applies to solar, wind, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear energy.
Gold requires a stable amount of energy to find and mine from the Earth, which is why it can be used to indirectly store energy use data. That is all there is to know about money data stored as gold.
Handling government currency devaluation is easy: move out of the currency into something else such as land, stocks, energy ownership. Sometimes even better is owe money that can be paid back in the future with devalued currency.
God created all energy in this universe, from which everything we know of is made from. God is pure energy. So really it does all tie back to trusting in God.
Those intricately printed paper bills are worth nothing in themselves. However, there is a good chance that you can exchange them for items of real value, and so that’s why we keep them.
But they lose value with time. Inflation is built into the currency system. My first job paid $1.65 an hour and an apartment was $25 a month. There is no way to avoid the loss of purchasing power. Government has built inflation into the system by printing more and more bills and “creating” more electronic money.
In God we trust. The rest pay cash.