Gold [https://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_6_month_o_usd_x.pn...] is of course one of them, but costs of many other liquid commodities have shot up counterintuitively this time as well.
There is nothing "magical" that has happened to banks when they switched to fiat money.
Of course there is. Deposit guarantees are enabled. That and the central bank’s credible power to influence money supply and borrowing costs as well as act as an unconstrained lender of last resort.
There is a lot of scholarship, originally from the turn of the last century but perennially refreshed, on the inherent failure modes of fixed-supply money systems amidst a growing, industrialising or industrialised economy.
Fixed-supply assets are good. Fixed-supply currencies cease, quickly, to be currencies.
So it was at the time when the king could've simply set the gold rate for the currency, and do the very same thing with borrowing, and lending on behalf of the state. Just before, it was much more likely led to more angry people with pitchforks than today.
No. The de facto currency was estimated mass of precious metal. The king could default, of course. But that is selective; inflation is not. Re-basing happened, but just as with money printing, it is tracked and accounted for and, in extreme cases, fled from.
Equating modern monetarism with gold-standard economics betrays, fortunately, a terrific opportunity to learn from works that have been peer reviewed, in many cases, for over a century.
If a gold standard was a disaster, I don't know what our current system is.
Students of central banking are familiar with central banking in the era of gold and why it was almost universally a disaster. (Most of Bagehot [1] concerns itself with bank runs.)
This paper’s audience is familiar with that history. Talking about Bitcoin would be like addressing why machine language wasn’t used in a CS paper.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street:_A_Descriptio...