The note is a simple receipt for gold or silver. That's all. Not complicated and such a receipt can be affected between to people like a contract if they want to and trust each other. Or, people can just exchange gold or silver between them. Tax man doesn't like it but that's why they got rid of it. It's a complet lie there isn't enough gold to back currency. Golds value is based on currency circulated. If you a Want to print 20k and back it with one ounce of Gold then you just determined the price of your gold. Now people will have to learn to price what is purchased accordingly. Currently most things are priced many times more than they are worth because a dollar is worth 2 cents. Everything should be devalued once a dollar is 100 cents again.