The gold standard doesn't make sense to me. I could see an oil standard, a natural gas standard, a milk standard, a cereal standard, a meat standard, a fish standard, a car standard, an airplane standard, a clothing standard, etc. Gold is not useful for much beyond fillings and jewelry.
Yeah, 5,000 years of recorded human history don’t mean squat.
Anything not invented after 1900 or so just don’t mean nothing.
“Gold is not useful for much beyond fillings and jewelry.”
The use of the item is not at issue. The issue is the ability to create it out of thin air like we do with the dollar and its resulting credit. Gold is still rare and takes tremendous effort to mine it. It cannot be created arbitrarily nor destroyed so easily. It is also rarely consumed by industrial processes. That makes it an excellent buffer against manipulation and for holding wealth.
Gold isn’t a consumable. It doesn’t tarnish, or corrode. All the things you listed are consumables, and therefore cease to exist when used. Not much of a standard if you can eat/burn/crash your money.
Gold is useful because of history. You don’t need to “sell” the idea of gold as money to anyone.
Let me put it to you this way: Your ass is in a jam. You need to get past some penny-ante bureaucrat. Doesn’t matter where in the world, you just need to get past him, or have him look the other way while you’re doing something.
You can flash a wad of paper. And maybe he’ll take it.
Or you can produce some gold coins - 24K, so he can verify with his teeth that they’re real.
It doesn’t much matter the language barriers or the circumstances, you’ll at *least* have some interest in that gold, if not a ‘sale.’
Go ahead and try explaining a currency based on a basket of commodities to people who are not versed in finance. I’ll still be around for several more years, so take your time and report back how that goes... ;-)