Gold as in Au does not need any third party. Certificates... that is another thing.
> Gold as in Au does not need any third party.
Even that generally needs a third party, unless you happen to be one of the world's experts in distinguishing counterfeit coin or bullion from gold of a certified purity.
Re:MtGox.com is offline
by tlrobinson on Wednesday February 26, 2014 @02:14AM
(#7303482)
Ok, but Bitcoin doesn't need an expert to do that, just widely available open source software that's already been vetted by thousands of developers.
So now the trust devolves onto the designers of the Bitcoin protocol, the software programmers implementing said protocol, the programmers implementing the operating system kernel that said software runs on, etc. etc. etc.
Just ask the MtGox users about how completely ironclad that trust is. Sure, "transaction malleability" was identified in 2011, but that didn't help the users of MtGox, and the other exchanges had to take corrective action in 2014 as well.
If anything Bitcoin is even worse for the normal user; physical security is much much easier for most of us to grasp and implement. Is Aunt Tillie going to be able to ensure that she never gets too rich, so as to entice a cyberattack to steal all her Bitcoin wealth?
Consider; what does using gold as money mean? Are we trading notional gold? Certificates that claim to represent gold in some vault? Obviously you need to trust the issuer of the certificates. Are you using minted gold coins? Obviously you need to trust the mint and more generally the entire financial system that equates those coins with a certain value. (The history of coin clipping, adulteration of coinage, and the results of having multiple currencies circulating at once[1] should show why this is important.) In fact, the only way that you don't actually need to trust a 3rd part is if...
...you're trading a known quantity of gold to someone else strictly for its value as gold. In which case you are actually trading in gold as a commodity; the technical term is barter. It simply does not fit the definition of money.
[1]: Eg, Gresham's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law