BRICS gold-backed currency and the many issues that it needs to overcome. The main concern is, who do you trust to hold the gold?
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I feel like we should take a redundancy approach to the value of our currency, kind of like having a backup generator for your home. Tie a single currency to gold, and cross reference the value to Bitcoin, to Silver, and Platinum. Should one fall or be manipulated in a way, you have multiple methods to directly solidify the value of your currency. You can also compare this to having multiple pathways for data to travel across the internet. Should one fail there are multiple other routes for internet traffic.
Not sure how that would look like in a practical sense, but I feel this could be a good solution to prevent manipulation.
This is how it used to work. It was never just "gold" until 1870(ish). This is not a solution at all, because then you are relying on a few different assets, and still missing the fundamental solution.
For example, the problem with the Roman Empire was one of hording silver, not gold. The plebians relied on silver, even though all the major transactions were done through gold.
A similar thing happened when we went off the silver standard around 1870. The value of silver (the primary currency of the plebs) was tied to gold at 15:1. When it was untied, and we went to a "gold standard," the value of silver plummeted to 20:1 because there was less gold available in the market. Gold, the currency of the Elite, had been hoarded by them. This ratio eventually fell to 100:1 a few decades later, now its around 80:1.
As an aside, the actual value of silver should be, and was historically, 10:1 to 8:1. The variance is because the amount of silver v. gold is about 10:1, but silver is more useful in our technology (both are useful, silver is more useful), thus it has a different supply/demand curve and is intrinsically more valuable.
The point is, even in a situation where there are multiple "currencies," the market can still be manipulated just by hording a single thing, because that single thing is relied on in some measure. It is the reliance that causes the point of vulnerability. If we rely, IN ANY WAY on a currency, then we are vulnerable to market manipulation.
Only a TRUELY FREE MARKET can possibly be free of manipulation. A free market cannot exist without a population wide understanding of what that means. It means no currency. No reliance on anything. That means barter.
That doesn't mean we can't have different "go to currencies." For example, you can pay for something in grain (which used to be a go to currency, long, long ago) or gold, or silver, or stock in a company, or whatever can be divided into reasonable transaction sized bits, can serve as a long term storage of wealth, has intrinsic value, and is reasonably convenient, or can be made convenient through infrastructure (created by a Free Market).
The solution is not in the creation of these standards however, but in an understanding of what a Free Market means.
But barter was used heavily by the elite to maintain control, too. Did you not support your local knight? Uh oh, your grain burned. Now you have nothing to barter. Don't like the new duke? Your hunting dogs all ate mideval antifreeze. Now you have nothing to barter.
Each and every monetary system can and has been manipulated via numbers games or force, even barter. The only way - only way - any money system has any chance is to make it 100% open and auditable AND have a populace that cares.
That second part is what always destroys any good intentions - be it faith, money, or republics.
It's not just barter, but barter is a fundamental part of a Free Market. The markets you are taking about were not free at all.
This is almost a restatement of my argument, except replace "money system" with "economic system."
What I'm saying is that barter doesnt give us a free market any more or less than fiat or single commodity does. All it does is add complexity to the marketplace that is exploitable.
Barter is a weaker option because it can target specific people or groups to destroy, where a single commodity or fiat model has the manipulations spread across the entire market place.
How do you have a reliable barter system in modern times where most transactions are digital? Sure, we should localize most of our economy and stop relying so much on foreign goods. But even locally, businesses still need technology to reliably and effectively conduct businesses.
There are many ways to create a digital Free Market. We have plenty of digital marketplaces already. We just don't think in terms of trade. As for making "transactions" easy, you can use gold if you want. You can use whatever you want as intermediary that fits into the criteria I created before. For example, if you want to pay in "stock," if all stocks are tied to their own NFT, paying in stock is as easy as paying in [insert your favorite digital currency here]. If gold, silver, platinum, nickle, iron, copper, bismuth, etc. have storage places and are tied to similar digital currencies (1:1) with sufficient infrastructure that the digital can be turned into the actual in a reasonable way, then again, you can use your stores of those items as "currency" in digital transactions.
And this is just off the top of my head. You can use anything as intermediary that fits the criteria listed in my previous post.
But the finer details aren't really important (at this time). What's important is helping people to understand why they should care, because at the moment, they don't, exactly as they have been trained.
How difficult can that end up? Your mortgage company only wants gold, car loan is silver, water bill is grain, power bill is apples and on down the line of bills it goes