[Klinky]

You have a dollar bill, you have gold; you want it in your physical possession, you trade in your dollar bill and the US redeems your gold. But for convenience you trade in paper bills.

How is that inherently better than fiat money? You are essentially trusting that the government will provide you with the gold on demand. The government could overprint & not actually have enough in reserves to cover all gold requests.

Additionally silver/gold certificates were redeemable for silver or gold dollars. The world gold market started making these coins worth more than the face value. You started to get speculators who would cash in & then sell the gold for more than the currency was worth. This also happened to Britain with their gold standard. Not to mention the overhead required to maintain & store large volumes of gold as well as punching out expensive gold coins.

I can see the nice concept of having a currency independent of government, but when you boil it down, money is all about trust. Even if we were on a world gold standard we would have to have faith that gold will keep a stable value & that other players in the market are being truthful about their reserves.