Bitcoin Forum

Another developing state, that the US would very much like a piece of, bans Bitcoin

http://www.cityam.com/1403264481/bitcoin-banned-bolivian-central-bank-threat-national-currency (http://www.cityam.com/1403264481/bitcoin-banned-bolivian-central-bank-threat-national-currency)

Russia, China, Thailand, India, and no doubt many more to come. They all know that Bitcoin was/is a pilot developed by NSA to wage financial warfare on other countries' economies. They can smell the US sanctions and/or other economic pressures and the capital flight via Bitcoin a mile off. A liquid Bitcoin market in a country also makes it very easy for powerful entities to get funds into that economy in order to sponsor 'destabilisers' of that economy/political system to do their deeds.

What we (including myself) all once thought was anarchic internet money of freedom, is actually The Man up to his same old tricks.

Sounds great!

Who the F cares about Bolivia.

It only means that BTC is doing something right.

You actually believe this stuff yourself? Stop smoking too much of that stuff man it makes you paranoid. :P

You don't think it is a bit fishy that Bitcoin is getting a very poor reception whenever it comes to the attention of any non NATO affiliated/controlled governments, whilst Western governments are all giving it the greenlight? I thought Bitcoin was meant to be a threat to the USD hegemony? If that is the case, why haven't the likes of Russia and China embraced it with open arms? Why isn't America banning it? Why are they legitimising Bitcoin by selling seized Bitcoins to entities such as large Western banks? IF Bitcoin was really a threat, the US could kill it stone dead, 2moro.


Just give it a few years m8. Something along those lines will come out about Bitcoins origins.

This stuff is forced by FUDsters who want cheap coins. When reading this quote it actually seems like true.

MatTheCat: China, Russia didn't accept BTC because they want to control things and are scared to change things that give power to people.

However, if BTC was created by NSA, which it was't, you would wish to hoooold BTC for a long time...

Why does it have to be all the dominoes falling rather than just take this news for what it is?
Maybe other countries follow, maybe not.  Perhaps it was the NSA, perhaps it was an independent programmer. 
Saying it with such certainty is ridiculous.

Russia, China, Thailand, Bolivia... what do all these countries have in common?  Lack of freedom and human rights.  (BTW, BTC seems ok in India, new exchanges etc have opened)

Saying Bitcoin is "the Man up to his same old tricks" is like saying that women's liberation was planned by "the Man" to put pressure on the middle east and other countries.

Perhaps it has something to do with the levels of corruption in the countries that are banning Bitcoin - corrupt regimes would have less interest in adopting an open protocol with a ledger of transactions that is open for all to view.

No but Women's lib might have been planned by "the Man" to weaken the power of Labour and enhance the power of Capital -> double the supply of labour, and dramatically reduce its cost.  

Then again it might not. Just the law of unintended consequences

I doubt it but I can't rule it out either. It just sounds too paranoid and conspiracy minded to me. There are many conspiracies going on of course and I am one to believe for instance that 9/11 was at least partly an inside job, and that most wars are not what most people think they are about. But that doesn't make every single thing you see some kind of conspiracy, can't you just fathom the idea that some random nerd genius came up with the idea of a cryptographic digital currency after seeing the flaws in our current monetary system and the fallout of the 2007-2008 economic crisis? To stay in your line of thinking I know that the NWO wants one global currency and do away with cash, but I doubt they had a cryptocoin in mind with a max of 21 million coins. Monopolies don't like the idea of decentralisation and not being able to control and inflate the money supply at their will.

Yeah. That's really bad news. Hopefully Zimbabwe and Somalia will not ban Bitcoin...

Of course this NSA - USA/bitcoin domination story is possible. Personally I don't hold to it, but I am old enough to know that there is much that I don't know.

However...

It certainly is not a necessary condition for governments around the world to want to ban bitcoin/alts aggressively - and do everything they can to keep them out of their citizens' hands. Weak currencies and the central banks that create them, should shake in terror at the easy availability of a strong international store of value, that is liquid, exchangeable and transferable across borders. Banning bitcoin is simply the most predictable response to prevent collapse of their fiat. No conspiracy theories required.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

MAT THE CAT
Losing credibility since 1842.

Not banned in Thailand (I am buying btc tomorrow in Bangkok, at least 3 exchanges exist here, most buying done by bank transfers).
Not banned in China (exchanges operating on high volume, albeit with bank problems).
Not banned in Russia.
Not banned in India (exchanges opening now).

BTC banned in Bolivia?  Who cares?

Yep. By what I know, Spanish news always end up translated as "banned". This is the first time the term is correctly used (unlike a couple of months ago in Colombia). It could still be argued that Bitcoin is not a currency, so you are bartering when exchanging it for goods or services, which would make the banning very arbitrary, but this is a real ban.

I agree that bitcoin might turn out to be yet another trojan horse, to get closer to a fully controlled police state.

What is your current Bitcoin position?  Long, Short, or Flat?

Can't tell if MTC is expert satirist or tinfoil hatter.

The fact that US is seen as an evil country for their oil wars, federal reserve banking and NSA spying does not make them a polar opposite to Russia and China. In fact, all of these giants are crooks and US could very well be just the lesser evil.

Russia and China are not run by the people of the country, but by the powerful few, a group, which is much worse than any NATO countries.

And you think they are holding majorities of their wealth in their own currency?

Well who cares about what Bolivia does?
I see a lot of interest from Brazil, and that's what matters the most in what concerns south america.

And I use to think this guy was smart.

The interesting thing is, in the brief post Soviet period when when relations between the West and the Russian Federation were at their sweetest during the Yeltsin perestroika era. That is when Russia was most 'free' and the time when Russia was in full on embrace with Western capitalist economics and policies. Unfortunately it was also the time of huge bread queues waiting on deliveries to come to practically empty shop shelves and poverty amongst the masses of the Russian population like we have never known in the west for a very very long time, whilst Jewish oligarchs in cahoots with Western finance, bought up the rights to all Russia's raw materials and national assets for pennies on the dollar, enriching a very select few, whilst the Russian state and most of the population went to the dogs. That was the only time in history when I can remember Russia or it's leaders getting a good press in the West. Since Putin came in and started to seize much of it back under state control and into the hands of his own cronies, we have started not to like Russia so much again.

A Western style liberal democracy is not in the interests of the vast majority of nations on this Earth, as adopting the kinds of policies that the West likes, opens them up to exploitation from external sources. That is why Western governments are so insistent that countries all over the world (especially oil rich or geo-poltically strategic ones) adopt Western values and policies.




If I were typing in German, they have a whole range of 'subjunctive' verbs that can be used to imply that something would, could, or might, be the case. But since I am typing in English, I will have to stick to saying it as though it were already established fact and as though I have all the evidence in front of me.




Or the greater evil when you start to look at the evidence that Wall St funded the communist revolution and the rise of Nazism in 30's Germany, which was also aided and abetted by Big US industry providing essential technology to their German subsidiary companies, without which Hitler would never have been able to wage war.....oh, incidentally, the US emerged from that little stramash with the majority of the world's gold reserves thus forcing the world on the path towards a USD global standard, and went from simply being an economic powerhouse, to thee eminent manager of global geo-politics. Just a coincidence, nothing to worry about.

This is indeed a very interesting thread of discussion.  However, if you accept the notion that the evil globalist bankers are controlled by the likes of a few people like the Rothchild family, it would be indeed very difficult for the world's existing puppet-masters to buy up or re-accumulate a high percentage of the world wealth if they started to buy up bitcoins in any quantity meaningful to a family with potentially $300Billion US dollars in wealth.   Bitcoin cannot be printed the way they print euros or federal reserve notes!! 

So for this reason, I don't see any way the NWO was behind the creation of bitcoin.  Also, if the globalists were able to kill off bitcoin, it would have happened already!  The market cap now is too big a threat.

Monopolies love the sound of any market that they think they can corner.




What happens if BTC or the notion of cryptocurrencies in general, was intended as a ways of undermining national economies by making capital flight out of the country very easy, and also making it very easy to get funds into a country which is to be put to nefarious purposes, such as funding militant or contra groups who are fighting a government whose policies the West doesn't like?


...and what if Satoshi's 1.5 MBTC are already the property of some intelligence arm of Uncle Sam? You think that any entity with access to 10% of all Bitcoins that exist and 5% of all those that ever will exist, is going to ever feel threatened by Bitcoin? And if they did, you think they couldn't kill it off literally with simple open market operations.......I can see the forum Headlines now: Satoshi's 1.5 MBTC transferred over to Bitstamp wallet SELL SELL SELL SELL!!!

1.World would be more free

2.Do not care

3.Cool story bro

Wake up ! bitcoin is about the empowerement of individual against governement  ;) how this could be bad ?

... because contrary to many opinions Bitcoin does not pose a threat to the convertible fiat currencies such as the USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, etc or the related banking system. It actually complements the existing fiat banking system very well. When it comes to non convertible fiat currencies with high degrees of inflation and fears of capital flight as in the case in many non NATO affiliated/controlled governments Bitcoin poses a very serious threat. This is the kind of article that keeps many officials in many non NATO affiliated/controlled governments awake at night. www.pymnts.com/news/2014/chinese-home-buyers-can-now-use-bitcoin-in-london (http://www.pymnts.com/news/2014/chinese-home-buyers-can-now-use-bitcoin-in-london)

Bitcoin by the way also poses a very serious threat to gold. If gold plunges in price it will be the western governments and their banks that have been selling and shorting gold that will be the winners and those who have been buying gold who will be the losers.

Edit: By the way after Bitcoin I consider the best investment to be short term US Treasury bills.

On the surface this seems like a crutial point.  As bitcoin grows 10-fold each year (mostly, anyway), Satoshi aquires alot of resources to buy off the world leaders.  But I think bitcoin leaves too much empowerment to the world masses to be attractive to the world puppetmasters.  No, I think fiat currency is their game.  And I think the Rothchilds and their kind would never embrace a tool that is so totally disruptive to the international banking systems.

Unfortunately i'm in western and i don't think my governement is so smart  :(

Hahaha i dont think the people can buy significant bitcoin to affect the price, so that thing ban is meaninless for us, well at some point is good; free advertising  :D

And people will buy at blackmarket in bolivia ;D

Eventually, but only after a solid liquid Bitcoin market has established itself in the west and Bitcoin stabilises to a price and market volume level that serves to greatly reduce it's volatility to the extent that Bitcoin is as good as the USD as a form of payment that can be accepted all over the world. When that happens, and the governments inevitably fail to crack down on the black market, what is to prevent Bitcoin from eroding the foundations of any economy that the worlds financial and military superpower starts pressing upon? If you were wealthy Bolivian, Botswanan, or Burmese, and the US started pressuring your government with sanctions and started funding paramilitary groups to fight against the government, what would you want to do? You would want to get your wealth into a form that is internationally accepted and is not dependent on the backing and credit rating of your government which would be getting increasingly pushed towards insolvency. Capital Flight via Bitcoin would help to accelerate this process.

1.If you have an Argentine like inflation rate you would not wait...

2.To prevent you just have to not be socialist, how US can hurt Dubai economy ?

3.Find a way for me, my family and my wealth to be in security.

4.So people can escape socialist tyranny and it's a bad thing ?

You have gone off the deep end now! I've heard the NSA thing as a joke, but are you serious with this? I see only conjecture here.

Anything to this? Links? :)

Bolivia is just protecting their c0caine exports. They fears SR as competitor :)

I am sorry, but I don't see any point in discussing this further with someone who is:

1.So geo-politically naive

2. So entrenched in self righteousness with the system in which he has grown up in.


.....How can US hurt Dubai economy? Why would they bloody want to? Are the Arab elites out in Dubai doing anything to displease the US or are they eating out their hands like good little Arab billionaires, just as the Saudis and the Qataris, etc also are? Why were the Arab Spring uprising's in Libya or Syria, good Arab revolts and the ones that happened in Saudi Arabia or Yemen only to be brutally put down by the police in those countries, 'bad' Arab revolts?

1.Cool, you don't want debate with somebody who have not the same view ?

2.Sure, i am a fucking stupid guy who don't know anything about politics and history... So it's simple to prove i'm wrong

3.What you are talking about ?

4.They do whatever they want, wanting peace and wealth is not stupid...

5.In where fucking place of the world do you live ? Here i know many people, arab or not, muslim or not, who go live or want to go live in Dubai cause they can hope for a good life, not in Libya, you know somebody who dream to live in Lybia ?

That's the same for revolts, some revolts was successful cause lot of people wanted change...

Yes. I also know of people who are out in Dubai for the high standard of tax free living that they can get out there. These people are generally working in oil industry and in very lucrative positions, or related to someone who is.

I am afraid I don't have any first hand opinions of the Pakistani taxi drivers, who work up to 90 hours per week in order to earn a subsistence wage and send a few pennies back to their families. Or the Filipino maids who are bought and sold into wealthy Arab families like bond slaves, who are also made to work like fucking dogs for a pittance, and count themselves lucky if they aren't physically or sexually abused in the process. And what about the slave labour construction workers who fall to their deaths like flies? Fuck those low caste dogs! Filthy rich Arabs and tax evading Western oil&gas men need big plush fancy skyscrapers to have their offices in and nice big wide roads to run their Ferraris on.

And that is about all I have to say on that matter, you pig ignorant red neck fuck.

1.Or because there native state do not give them any chance to success ?

2.No, there is many sector that recruit  :D It's also a great place and a great chance for European muslim who have ambition, like there religion and don't want a welfare state.

3.Yes, you do not know what about you are talking. Go to Lybia, Egypt, Tunisia and ask people if they want to work in Dubai, they are very poor... You should be Venezuelan or something like that.

4.I'm not American, fail.

and red neck fuck you

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs47/i/2009/175/d/a/Red_neck_couple_stock_20_by_Tigg_stock.jpg

Lol, thats what I like about matt, always speaks his mind

Holy Phuck!

So that means that there is another culture out there that produces selfish, ego-centric, ignorant mofos like you?

I shall have to get my pen n notepad out for this one!

So hologram, do tell where you are from?

Matt, I am an American and I consider myself to be humble. I like to think that there are a few of us left here in the good old USA.   

We are all over the world ! You are surround !  ;D

You are stupid as only a fucking communist can be, you can easily know my country if you reflect a little  ;D

lol the amount of fresh capital well lose! its staggering  :D

WTF? 3 pages and nobody has pointed out the fact that the title of this thread is wrong?

Bolivia did not ban bitcoins.

The Bolivia central bank does not allow bitcoins to be used in their bank accounts.


McDonalds does not allow the sale of Whoppers in their restaurants in the US. The United States bans Whoppers!

Hey yeah...you can't ban Bitcoin.  What the heck are you thinking OP?  If anything, bitcoin may just get proactive on Boliva's arse just like they did China sometime back :)

This is true. And Bolivia did not ban Bitcoin.

:-)

Best. Alliteration. Ever.

I'm starting to suspect MTC has a mental illness.

taking away the bank issue...

Processed cocaine is illegal in Bolivia.  As the world knows Bolivia is obviously excellent at enforcing their laws  ::)
I would also not mind seeing an example where Bolivia has enacted a policy that other nations decided to follow.  

Why are people bashing the US in a thread about Bolivia.....and where are these individuals from that is such a great fucking flawless place?  I'll move there, I don't care, but prove it.   

That's irrational bashing, your USA politician are sometimes really fucking idiots but Bolivia is just a complete WTF place, even more than my country  ;D

First they laugh at you then they ban Bitcoin.

then we win  :D

You can whip me all you want, White Devil, but you will never devaluate my bitcoins!

In early USSR (1919) Lenin tried to suppress money  ;D Socialist never learn from the past  ;D

The entire world is fucked right now, the US is just at the heart of it. Give it a few more years before the true magnitude of how deep in shit we really are becomes apparent to even the dumb politicians and mainstream media. There's no escaping this fucking mess, humanity either learns how to get their shit together or most of us will simply die.

Can you elaborate. You mean inflation right? What other things. (I don't really look into this sort of thing) Thanks

edit to hologram below this comment:
thanks, I forgot to add that to my original statement.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
isnt it 17.5 tn?

Or the 60t$ USA debt  ;D

He waits for another conspitard to come along and echos back his ramblings. The economy is always about to crash consistently since the 1950s or something.

"fucking" maybe,
But "stupid" is a questionable attribute for communists, considering the paranoid scare you (or your older ideological clones) once felt about them...

I fear them cause they are the best at mass killing, that don't make them smart...
And US debt clock don't include government pension to worker.

"If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That's the fiscal gap," he says. "That's our true indebtedness."

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-09-23/17-trillion-us-national-debt-try-211-trillion (http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-09-23/17-trillion-us-national-debt-try-211-trillion)

Oh, alright, did not calculate that in. (more than 17.5 tn) Thanks

I was bashing another poster's homogeneous and parochial minded 'right wing' ego-centric ideology. 99% of the time, such an ideology is reserved for a section of the American population who suffer from both cultural ignorance and cultural arrogance which results in them having a very blinkered view of geo-politics and life in general. As it turns out though, this poster is not American, but French. That surprises me. I have met many Americans who are fully compos mentis and actually very intelligent individuals, yet seem really fucking stupid when they start talking about certain things. Of course, this stupidity is culturally enforced and no doubt if I were born and raised in America, i would be affected by it also. However, hologram is French, which means that he has no excuse. He can't blame his cultural environment for his ignorant, ego-centric, and actually rather vile ideology. He must have sought it out all by himself.

Zerohedge is openly catastrophist, but sometime they have good analysis.


 :D What do you know about my country ? You think it's the fucking socialist paradise MSNBC tell you ? You know somebody who wanted to stay in my country ? Because i know many people who has go out  ;D

Ho, and 20% of French and 43% of young French want to quit France, that's an incredible success  ;D
http://www.ipsos.fr/ipsos-public-affairs/actualites/2014-04-04-expatriation-benefices-qu-en-tirent-francais (http://www.ipsos.fr/ipsos-public-affairs/actualites/2014-04-04-expatriation-benefices-qu-en-tirent-francais)

best at mass killing !?!
Which ELO ranking of mass killers do you use to assert that?

the one which discard niggers as points or the one which discard communists? ( I presume you don't use the one which discard class ennemies)

Are you serious ?  ;D
In where place of the world people still say communist do not killed dozen million of people ? Even in France just few people still think that.

No, I'm just trying to take your point of view.

That's not very serious, just a litlle bit sad, I must admit...

Debt is one thing but that's actually just a symptom of a much bigger problem. They're trying to inflate their problems away by printing money but that's not working either. Deflation is what's coming next, and that will cause total panic because that will lay bare the true burden of debt and its influence on the future. Governments and banks aren't afraid of deflation because people will start to delay their spending, but because it will make debt unbearable. So naturally printing presses will start going crazy and the fake economy we have built up will start falling apart sending billions of people into poverty and chaos. Unless we can somehow address the real problems and build a new economy based on real value and real wealth and not on (financing) debt, infinite growth and redundant consumerism.

You are right. But if the debt system collapse it will not be chaos, people will switch to a better money, like bitcoin, gold, silver... Like the Zimbebwe switched to USD after Mugabe's economics.

Thanks for the explanation. I usually don't do my research on this sort of thing (I guess just seems depressing to me @I usually just research things I like like tech etc).

As you can imagine, all of this seems scary (debt etc) and it would be nice to see some kind of legit gold standard or some true value happen somewhere in the world.

I feel like this thread is being hijacked lol (Matt original made this for the bolivia news)

 ;)

A switch to gold, silver and/or bitcoin won't be that smooth, imagine 6 billion people trying to rush into gold, silver and bitcoin at the same time. A switch to USD is much easier especially for a small country like Zimbabwe. Anyway we'll just have to live and see through it and hope for the best, humans are most resourceful when their back is against the wall so I'm still relatively optimistic even though it's gonna be scary. Back to Bolivia now and their 'ban' on bitcoin lol.

A switch is not smooth and a lot of people will lose money, but money is not capital, if dollar and euro are toilet paper tomorrow there still will be all the thing we have build in this world.

For Bolivia i think they go for an Argentinian like experiment and Venezuela follow them.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-thriving-argentinas-black-market-economy/ (http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-thriving-argentinas-black-market-economy/)

LOL

True.   :D

I think you are wrong on 2 points:
1) Americans are far, far from the worst.  Germans, Swedes, Australians are all (in my experience) worse.  Every Asian country is much worse, and I have lived in Asia for 15 years.
2) If you think it is a right wing phenomenon, you haven't dealt with left wing NGO/charity employees.

It is cultural ignorance and arrogance.  But it is not a right wing American phenomenon.

You are right, he don't know the incredible amount of people like that France produce, they are just mainly unpolitical or leftist. You have the avoided "frontiste" too, the member of the French national socialist party where you sing nazi music, and obviously pro-russian  :D

There's really bad situations in many countries (specially the most economically relevant ones).
However, I don't think we should be bashing each other when there are catholic and orthodox churches being bombed almost every day in arabic countries. And I by no means mean it's the general population. Just putting things in perspective...

I don't think it has so much to do with countries, as it does to do with *people*. People are crazy.

welcome to ignore  ::)

Within countries, exists culture(s), which tend to affect or colour peoples mentalities, ideas, and world outlook. So it is every bit as much about countries as it is about people.




Yup that is right.

The majority of the Russian Oligarchs that emerged as billionaires as a result of them appropriating all of Russia's resources during the 'free 4 all' Yeltsin era, were Jewish. Pretty good going for a country with Jewish population of around 0.1%, don't you think?

Care to prove me wrong?  You can't, because it is a fact.

Am I allowed to notice this fact? Am I allowed to declare this fact? Does noticing this make a racist? Or even worse than racist, an Anti-Semite?

that's not the point.

It is for me.

Your ideology can or at least should only be contrived in a cultural melting pot of self-righteous ignorance and arrogance. The sort of ideology that American culture churns out so well, yet you are French.

you know who else was french!  ;D
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/28/article-2570159-1BE8D97000000578-30_634x528.jpg

Your hypothesis is false, try again. And you are arrogant too...

Are you kidding?  They got about a million "satoshi" bitcoin for free, and even today bitcoin are essentially free for anyone who can print money.  It's only when people stop accepting fiat for btc that it even begins to get remotely expensive for the banking elite.

You can't "ban" something that is virtual, all these country's make decisions of which they don't even know are legit or do-able in any way, hmpf..

This just in: Governments hate anything that undermines their absolute control over every aspect of your life.  More at 11.

But Bolivia also bans pot, but not coca leaves ... go figure.

Re. BTC being US imperialist conspiracy. Can't say the idea hasn't crossed my mind (fleetingly) - but I don't buy it.

1) China's/Russia's ambivalence to BTC (and they aren't the only countries to be so currently predisposed) stems more from, in my view, them having an eye on their own currencies possibly playing a role as a world reserve currency. Their economies and countries would then reep the benefits that the US economy has from having the USD as reserve currency. They might feel they deserve this benefit. BTC comes along and pulls the rug from under their feet almost - you can see why they'd be a little aggrieved.

2) BTC is decentralised and without central governance, as we all know. The US powers that be can no more control it for their own ends than anyone else. It would be like them funding a renegade bunch of Middle East fundamentalists in the hope that they will capture us country A - and leave alone country B, for the US alone to exploit.

Oh shit, wait a minute ......  :-\

With regards Bolivia - it seems obvious to me why they've banned (have they ?) BTC - they banned it cos its much easier to take a line of cocaine up your nose using a dollar bill than it is using elliptic curve cryptography algorithms  ;D

Since is their history. You cant just denies your history. You then dont know any more who you are.

And what about gold? The Gold Standard was 'decentralised' in that every year the any national deficit between two countries banking systems would have to be settled in gold that nobody could just magically pull out of a hat. Could nobody be in control of that?

Really?

Is world history not littered with examples of metals markets being cornered and controlled?

Did the US not emerge from WW2 with all the world's gold, which was a vital stepping stone in pushing the world to accept the current petro-dollar standard?

Could Bitcoin not also be bought up and cornered by the big players and thus controlled by the big players?

Is Satoshi's 1.5 MBTC not already in the hands of some arm of US intelligence? If so, would 1.5 MBTC be enough of a market share to ensure control of the Bitcoin market?

Hey matt, what do you think about a crypto that was only traded for gold or something (meaning the users would not trade it for Fiat). I know it has many flaws (hard to divide a piece of gold for a fraction of a bitcoin). I made a thread similar to this subject (a few days ago in this spec forum and had slight discussions about this (on other threads here).

I personally think it probably would not work because people would just break the rules and exchange for fiat (and gold is too hard to break up and exchange for the cryptos)

If you mean a virtual currency backed by real gold.  Been there, done that, and it failed spectacularly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

That wiki page is a fascinating read; especially the part where they indicate the definition of money transmitter was broadened by the Patriot Act to include the transmission of anything of value.  The government used that newly expanded definition to go after E-Gold as an illegal money transmitter.  I would assume that new definition is still in place in our current days of Bitcoin.