Bitcoin Forum

We all know that the US dollar is swimming in 20 trillion dollars of debt, which doesn't bode well for the future of the world economy because it depends on that currency as a reserve requirement. Everybody is predicting the crash of the USD but no one has any idea how, when, or what the alternative will be.

Here's a pretty far-out idea:

https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2018/08/gold-yuan-crypto/

A gold-backed currency guaranteed by blockchain. This would prevent something like the fractional reserve system from occuring again where banks lend out 90% more than what they physically have. Sounds feasible?

For me it is obvious that dollar would not be sending any more for 10 years from now, because it is a currency that is unavoidably questioned. This is just a matter of time when it would crash completely.

Debt is definitely an issue with the US dollar, so is fractional reserve which is essentially part of what fuels the debt.

However, I don't really see a need for a gold backed crypto. And the idea that the gold backed CNY will be the underlying backing for the crypto is just even more confusing to me, in my opinion. Any crypto where its value stems from something "backing" it relies heavily on trust on the entity holding the reserves being honest, and that takes away from the trustless nature of crypto to begin with.

Bitcoin itself is perfectly capable of storing its value in the long run because of its decentralization, and the fact that supply is limited, means that it can essentially imo be an alternative to fiat without the uncontrolled depreciation in the long run, even without a gold backed crypto.

This could be one of the reasons why SEC is denying ETF because it will make cryptocurrency very powerful and that will render the dollar of its position. This could have financial and political drawbacks for the country

There's controversy over what constitutes a "gold backed currency".

Some say for a currency to truly be "gold backed" requires a lawful guarantee that paper or electronic money can be exchanged for gold. The US dollar had this guarantee printed on it up until the 1970s I believe when that guarantee was removed.

Others claim its sufficient for a currency to be backed by gold reserves like the USA holds in fort knox. The definition of "gold backed" needs clarification.


There's nothing preventing those demographics with money and influence from lobbying to have false propaganda as standard curriculum instated. This could cause students to be indoctrinated into the view that fractional reserve banking is the best system for everyone.

Few are aware of circumstances and regulation which contributed to the 08' financial crisis. Fewer still could describe what the specific issues were much less how to prevent them in the future. Public consciousness and memory are fickle things.

Bitcoin's supply may be limited, but people don't realize that there are enough units for everyone to transact with. At some point 1BTC will be so much worth, that even one single satoshi will become a measurable value unit.

Don't forget that 1BTC can be cut into 100 million smaller units. If you do 100 million times 21 million you'll see that Bitcoin's limited supply won't form an obstacle or barrier when it comes to being widely usable money.

Bitcoin is not perfect, but it's capable of doing the job fiat used to do, but always failed afterwards because of how flawed the whole system is. If things play out in our favor, we'll see Bitcoin become what gold is today.

This might be possible but it can never replaced the US dollar. The reason is that the fiat currency is monitored and is controlled by the government to avoid loses which could lead to a bigger economic crisis. While cryptocurrency doesn't have so much of this regulation and is uncontrolled, it would be hard for the government to oversee how their money is moving because due to anymomity of cryptocurrency.

Can you have a gold-backed cryptocurrency which is truly decentralized? You need a person/company who is able to maintain the peg. And the danger is that the person in charge may turn out to be untrustworthy. You are better off trusting the United States government to maintain the value of the dollar.

When it comes to debt, its management is what matters and not the amount involved. Virtually every country has debt and although the US has the chunk on the total world debt it still does not mean there is trouble hanging somewhere so far all the creditors are not calling for it at the same time. When one even take a look at it, the debt itself might not exist aside the ones owed to external parties and lending organization, some of the debts are just provisions, while the others are to put a figure to it. Most of the debts is the cumulation of individual debts from mortgages, credit cards, insurance, health benefits, car loans etc which are owed to corporations. This corporations would be able to defer the tax they are to pay till when they receive these payment depending on what the tax law specifies. Put all these together, you realise technically majority of the debt don't exist and if its continued to be managed, there is no cause for alarm.

I do not expect the model of that A gold-backed currency guaranteed by blockchain to be successful, because of the materiality of that currency, since it must be physically present to create it [It cannot guarantee that governments are manipulating that process].

Therefore, the role of blockchain in that process is only transparency. It would be a guarantee to hold those trades not coins.
Also, we can not neglect that there is a lot of imaginary money so that the currency will force to get an imaginary value because of the small amount of gold for the current money.

Generally, there are many related projects such as OneGram[1], GOLDMINT [2].

[1] https://onegram.org/
[2] https://www.goldmint.io/

I read that there are coin projects supported by gold, do you think this project will succeed and be victorious? his name is JINBI, have you ever heard of it?

I was going to say this. Why do we need a gold-backed crypto if we have bitcoin? Also, gold is valuable because people believe it is valuable, it has some psychical applications, of course, but those applications were more valuable 2,000 years ago than they are today.


Very interesting. I never thought of it that way. Although I think many people disagrees with you.

Practically no one, outside of computer science departments, can explain how cryptocurrencies work, and that mystery creates an aura of exclusivity, gives the new money glamor, and fills devotees with revolutionary zeal.

If it's backed by gold, what about the certificate and the storage (and the cost to store in the vault). It's going to make a centralized currency, ...again... it doesn't look something easy to create. Also just to remind you, the us dollar was backed by gold until 30 or 40 years ago

I don't know any government that would accept a currency they could not inflate away.  People will starve if that happens as all social programs would be cut and people would have to make it on their own.  Sounds wonderful. 

I don't think that's much of a problem for average people. In the end they just care about convenience and not about decentralization. If they can use it instantly, for free, enjoy a variety of insurances on purchases and whatnot, the mass will gladly use it.

In China AliPay and WeChat Pay are giant monsters offering people the ultimate form of convenience, where everyone on the street is using at least one of these apps to conduct day-to-day transactions instantly. It will be near impossible to make these people switch to crypto currencies, and I can't really blame them if they ignore crypto for that specific use.

Also, I think having centralized payment solutions helps covering crypto's main weakness, which is that it can't handle mass use. The mass will keep using centralized money, and those who care enough about decentralized money will use Bitcoin. That's what I consider to be a healthy balance.

We are not living 1950s anymore. Gold backed something is not a case anymore because gold price also depends on us dollar.

From the title of the topic, I just thought that it would be at least including including the recent ICO project Jinbi, which for signatory campaign participants was closed on July 26. The issued token, according to the ICO team, will be provided with gold. In six weeks of the ICO campaign (by the way, the generosity was very large, which attracted a large number of participants in the ICO generosity campaign), the company was able to raise 11,995,000 dollars in the crypto currency. However, yesterday at their Telegram I read that the ICO is prolonged until September 31, as many investors have not yet invested their funds in this project. I participated in the signature campaign of this ICO and should earn more than five thousand dollars at their current token price of $ 7.06. The team claims that their token by 2025 will cost $ 999. We will see.

To tell the truth it rather sounds unbelievable although everything may happens. Generally speaking, I do think that dollar will be substituted by something else in the near future. You tell us about the debt, yes, there is the incredible debt but tell us who is able to claim to return this debt. In fact, I do not know any countries, organizations or even groups of people which are ready to start the process versus USA because we should not forget that this is the debt of USA. In the current world order USA is the strongest country and USA may afford not not pay money back to lenders so the debt is not reason of fear in case of dollar.

There's a reason why several of these gold backed cryptos have already popped up and pretty much has done nothing major.

I think that the primary reason is that the value of a gold backed crypto comes solely from the fact that you trust the custodian of your metals to keep it safe and not just run with it. You also trust them to run a full reserve instead of a fractional reserve. By having a gold backed crypto you're also handing over control over the entire money supply to the founder of the blockchain, as he is able to constantly add new units to circulation.

Essentially, this is going to be no different to centralised stablecoins like Tether, except with gold. I don't see how this not so trustless system is any better than bitcoin itself.

It may not sound like a more trustable system than what we've already got with bitcoin, but that's not going to stop a major financial power from trying to implement it. The Chinese have been buying up assets from Vancouver to Cape Town in an effort to show their "soft power" or financial dominance around the world. This Yuan-sponsored-gold-backed-crypto would be more of an excuse by them to step in and try to replace Bitcoin. Not that it would be a good idea for us.

And regarding the debt, another thing that is often missed is the GDP figures. 18.57 trillion GDP is not that far off from 20 trillion in debt.

All the conjectures here are just conjectures given there is nothing to verify them. It's just to express the discussion for the story. What's the property like? What is the value of money? All of them, with the effort of the future, can prove them. In fact, it is still necessary to use gold as a decorative item, while currency (usd) for economic circulation, and electronic money for the technological age. Each asset has its own features and needs more time to make decisions for them. I think so.

That is true that the US is in a great dept right now and only a very few percentage of its population knows about it and is doing something about it. If another great recession happens again in the economy of the USA many people will turn into cryptocurrency regardless of its volatility(which is one of the reasons many people are still afraid of it) to save all of their assets whether it is gold, real state and even health care.

Why gold backed? there's no need of gold or any other physical commodity backing up a crypto, the PoW coins are already backed up by the energy you need to mine it and the net's computational power, to give more stability, the thing people try to do with the commodities as back up you need consumers who use the coin for daily purchases.

This is just what we like to do. Speculate, make conjectures, and wonder about strange things that we have no idea about. Sometimes they may come true, if we can make the connections ahead of time.

The wonder of crypto lies in it's immature nature. It is still a naive asset that is trying to establish itself in the market and no one really knows how to treat it. There are still arguments going on whether it's a currency or asset or whatever. This means that it still hasn't settled, and it has great potential because of that.