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by jbarham 4896 days ago
> Today, with reputable central banks you don't need gold anymore.

Quantitative easing (aka printing money) isn't doing much for the reputation of central banks...

1 comments

You're confounding "gold as a way to implement currency" with "gold as a way to lock monetary policy". And that's so common I address it in the original comment:

>Gold's proponents usually mention that a gold standard would set a fixed money supply that can't be altered by a central banker. Yet if that's what you want you could just change the law to impose that rule on the central bank, just as you'd need to change the law to move to a gold standard.

Why bother changing the law when you can just change your medium of exchange. Much simpler to just trade in gold than to try to keep the Fed in check.
You need to change the law if you want the central bank to move to a gold standard or to have a fixed monetary policy so that your legal tender currency doesn't inflate.

Other than that if you just want to trade using a non-inflatable currency you can just go right ahead and trade with gold if your counterparty accepts it. But if you're willing to accept that restriction something like bitcoin is probably a better solution that doesn't involve carrying and securing large quantities of heavy blocks of metal.