The ability of the US government to tax any companies or individuals residing in the US seems pretty “real” (more-so than gold anyway..)

Let’s keep it at “real” with the quotation marks. Gold tends to last longer than your average nation state.

This is not a problem when the promises of a nation state only need to last as long as the nation state itself.

> Gold tends to last longer than your average nation state.

I’m not sure how that’s useful. The capability to produce goods and services seems a whole lot more real to me in terms of value than gold (the value of which would collapse anyway if modern economy did).

In theory can have currencies directly backed by oil, wheat or copper if you don’t want fiat for some reason. Would still be more ”real” than gold.

> only need to last as long as the nation state itself.

1$ from the 50s is not worth much in the 80s and even less today. Seems like that should be a much bigger concern than the longevity of the state itself.

> In theory can have currencies directly backed by oil, wheat or copper

That is to some degree what USD is ("Petrodollars"):

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/072915/how-petro...

You can’t redeem them for a fixed amount of oil so I would say this is quite different.

> there wasn't any backing of fabricating new dollars

Wow that’s compelling.

> except for the sheer trust in the US government

Oh, you mean “except for” the single most powerful entity on planet earth

You need only to trust that the US government has 11 aircraft carriers and thousands of nukes.