Re:Texas moves to create gold-backed digital currency
by mschuster91 on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @06:58AM
(#35872447)
> 3) Arguably a subset of 2) but Apocalypse Enthusiast. "When civilization crumbles, the obvious trade unit won't be something like grain, alcohol, or bullets, but my bags full of low-grade silver dimes! I'll be King of the Wasteland!"
Yes, direct trade may definitely be grains, alcohol or bullets - but as soon as economies more complex than a self sufficient farm village crop up, eventually some form of token will be required.
For that, historically gold and silver have been the established tokens of choice for millennia, and even today's currencies are backed by insane amounts of gold in central bank vaults - it's not a bad assumption per se to think that gold and silver will outlast even our modern civilization. Come to think of it, most of the world's currencies sans the Swiss Franc and the US dollars are barely decades old.
We're already seeing a switch from the US dollar as the universally accepted international reserve and trading currency - only 60% of reserves and 40% of trades are valued in dollars, mostly towards the Euro and, in smaller amounts, yen, yuan and a bit of Francs. Think forward a few decades... what humans create can vanish in a very short time.
Yes, direct trade may definitely be grains, alcohol or bullets - but as soon as economies more complex than a self sufficient farm village crop up, eventually some form of token will be required.
For that, historically gold and silver have been the established tokens of choice for millennia, and even today's currencies are backed by insane amounts of gold in central bank vaults - it's not a bad assumption per se to think that gold and silver will outlast even our modern civilization. Come to think of it, most of the world's currencies sans the Swiss Franc and the US dollars are barely decades old.
We're already seeing a switch from the US dollar as the universally accepted international reserve and trading currency - only 60% of reserves and 40% of trades are valued in dollars, mostly towards the Euro and, in smaller amounts, yen, yuan and a bit of Francs. Think forward a few decades... what humans create can vanish in a very short time.