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(IANAEconomist, just a highly opinionated idiot.)

Go study how money supply figures M0, M1, M2, M3, etc layer & interact. For purposes of this post, M0 is the total value of physical currency. What you’re basically doing is replacing M0’s current set of fiat paper dollars with gold. There’s currently something like M0 = $4T in actual physical US currency. From there every other “dollar” is really an IOU, with each M# throwing another layer of fractional-reserve IOUs on the stack.

Big problems happen when too many people try to move their Mn money back a layer at once, running out of available M(n-1) money to replace it - the worst case being a “run on banks” where everyone tries to withdraw their savings into cash (M1 to M0 conversion, insufficient M0 funds).

Methinks a proper/tolerable conversion to a gold standard would be making each current physical dollar (ALL OF THEM) tradable for gold. Alas, that would require something like 150,000 tons of gold. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all of it - we’d need all the gold ever mined, so that’s not happening ever.

That leaves us with the only viable solution being creation of a fractional-reserve “M-1” money supply, with something like a 10:1 dollar-to-gold holdings ratio. ...which still leaves us with the problem of acquiring 1/10th of the gold ever mined and getting it into Fort Knox (and securing it). Increase that to or above 100:1 and we approach possible (mayyyyyybe...) but are now faced with the increasing potential of a “run on gold” where more people want to trade their dollars for gold than there is gold available. And I’m not going to back a system where I _can’t_ go to the Reserve, Treasury or Mint and do a 1:1 exchange of paper dollars for metallic gold, any more than I will put my money in a bank where I can’t cash out on demand (small fee grudgingly tolerated).

All this boils down to the problem that if we go to a tolerable gold standard, all the gold will be “cashed out” and hoarded - causing system collapse.

Nixon et al pulled off the greatest heist in history when making it illegal to own gold (as currency), then took us off the gold standard.

“Bad money drives out good.” That economic principle explains why we’re off the gold standard, marginalizing cash, swapping debit cards for credit cards, transitioning our possessions from outright ownership to rental, running up an un-repayable national debt, and “quantitative easing” our currency onto the virtualized debt of “$0 = ($1) + ($-1)”. Reversing the trend is hard to do individually, and at this point d@mn near impossible nationally.

A gold standard is a great idea.
I don’t see how we can get back to it without completely destroying our economy.