What world currencies are actually backed by gold?

[deisik]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080827115251AAYDgdW
Q: What world currencies are actually backed by gold?
A: None

Im no economist, but what would it take for bitcoins to be "backed by gold"?

Possible, Plausible or Impossible?
I see two possibilities either a wealthy person puts up some gold to back the whole currency, or a bitcoin wallet provider purchases gold and its customers wallets are backed by the gold standard.


P.S. I have no gold. Just thinking out loud.

It is plausible but impossible in practice

Theoretically, you could back up a cryptocurrency with physical gold, and I know that some coins are in fact claiming just that (though I don't know how true their claims are). It is definitely not possible to back up Bitcoin with gold since there is no single entity which controls it. Otherwise, you would just be selling gold for bitcoins and vice versa at a certain price, fixed of floating, as this is what your idea (actually, two ideas) comes down to. Needless to say that it would have little to do with real backup by gold or any other hard asset. You should have complete control over the token which you are going to redeem for gold, including the clause where you have the right to revoke certain tokens or declare them illegal at your own discretion

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[cellard]

It will never happen again. Governments don't want to empower the average citizen with hard money, they just want to have the control of the monetary supply at all costs and control all parameters. Hard money doesn't allow them to modify the total supply and other variables, the most obvious being the amount in circulation. I think it's just delusional to expect the gold pattern to happen again. The bst we have now is bitcoin, but goldbugs think that some day we will go back to trading actual gold for goods and services instead of bitcoin. The question obviously being why the hell would you do that unless you are ok with not taking advantage of a global market and you stay within your local niche community which happens to accept gold for some reasons.

So dump your gold an fiat and buy bitcoin seems like the most sane thing to do at this point.

[maculeth]

there is no indeed, but when we look at the gold exchange rate, surely the first thing that emerges is the exchange rate of gold to the dollar. Is the dollar backed by gold? not really. it happens because some countries also use the dollar as a benchmark for the value of their currency.

[deisik]

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080827115251AAYDgdW
Q: What world currencies are actually backed by gold?
A: None

Im no economist, but what would it take for bitcoins to be "backed by gold"?

Possible, Plausible or Impossible?
I see two possibilities either a wealthy person puts up some gold to back the whole currency, or a bitcoin wallet provider purchases gold and its customers wallets are backed by the gold standard.
P.S. I have no gold. Just thinking out loud.

You can't backup bitcoin with gold because that will stuck the price and bitcoin would lose that volatility, and gold standard doesn't work at all, we already see it fail once, why should we adopt that model if we realized it doesn't work. That would be non sense.

It is technically impossible because Bitcoin doesn't belong to anyone, i.e. no one has complete control over it. If you have plenty of gold and many thousands of bitcoins, you can do something to that tune and set an arbitrary exchange rate. But if this exchange rate doesn't follow the market prices, people will quickly buy up either gold or bitcoins from you depending on the discrepancy between your and market prices. If you keep your exchange rate floating, then the whole idea of backing up Bitcoin with gold will be pointless

What we can do is to have a QR code on a gold coin, in that QR have a private key with an addy with 1btc, that would be fun, the double value coin 

If I remember correctly, there were gold bitcoins as you describe them (QR codes and all) but you had to pay a premium for them which equaled or even exceeded the price of gold in these coins

[ImHash]

No need to back bitcoin with gold, Would you even consider to back whatever amount of gold you have with yet any other amount of gold? World currencies have to be backed by gold because if for example a country prints more money than they have gold to back, You could simply disrupt their economy by getting their money and buy their gold with it.
Every country has gold, They have to report it to the world bank, Otherwise they won't be able to print any money.

[deisik]

No need to back bitcoin with gold, Would you even consider to back whatever amount of gold you have with yet any other amount of gold? World currencies have to be backed by gold because if for example a country prints more money than they have gold to back, You could simply disrupt their economy by getting their money and buy their gold with it

How's that really?

Every country prints way more money than it has gold. There are about 7T dollar worth of gold in the whole world as of now, while the size of the US national debt alone is 3 times greater than that amount. Some countries don't even have gold reserves at all or their gold is in someone else's hands (e.g. Germany). And so what? Can you explain how buying up all gold in a country can ever disrupt its economy? Any economy today is based on real production, not on a shiny metal, whereas gold itself is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things as its uses are rather limited, and in no case its shortage can threaten a more or less developed economy

[Ividanik]

It's an interesting idea, but i don't think it works this way. It's not possible to back bitcoin by gold as it's decentralized currency without emitter, that's why no one can back bitcoin with gold following the gold standard

[FedorIzmailov]

I'm sure that none of this will happen and yes it is not necessary that bitcoin be backed up with gold because he himself is digital gold