People have rose-colored glasses with gold and silver backed currencies, but they were a factor in the Great Depression and directly responsible for several severe recessions and panics.

The gold standard of Bretton Woods also never had enough gold to back it up. It was a fiction the world kindly played along with the US on.

Limiting us to gold also exposes us to massive economic swings, due to the limited ability to control how much or how little we all agree exists. I always hear people talk about how we 'print money' when we need it but NO ONE mentions that we also take money OUT of the economy all of the time.

We originally chose gold because of its fundamental properties I mentioned earlier, and then we chose paper notes because they worked better than gold.

However, this is where I think we see things differently. Originally the paper notes represented gold and so had the same limited supply. So it had all the improvements in portability, divisibility etc but also had the (illusory) strength of gold's scarcity. It seems perfect. In digital form even better! But over time bankers began to print more notes than there were gold and the notes rapidly lost their limited supply. For around the last century, the bankers have roughly doubled the number every decade. Make sure you've understood that - each decade since at least 1971, they've taken all the dollars in existence and printed the same quantity again out of thin air (as loans), and charged interest on every single one every year to date! This dilutes the wealth in the dollar system across twice as many dollar units, resulting in it causing a halving of the wealth in each dollar unit, every 10 years (this leaking value goes into the freshly created dollars). It's the main factor behind price inflation. It's why houses seem to go up in value for ever. They're not, they are just being priced in units which are going down and down in value. Houses still cost roughly the same today in gold as they did in the 70s.

This money printing causes enormous hidden problems to the world. The people who are close to the money printer get greatly discounted money, and the value of that money is sucked out of the dollars held by the people furthest away - your savings, your wages, your pension, granny's savings under the mattress, and all without you realising! It's called the Cantillon effect. The bankers get more and more powerful (they're collecting interest on every single dollar in existence even though they just printed them out of thin air!) and the population get weaker and weaker. What makes it worse is the people direct their anger at "greedy" businesses for the price increases rather than the banksters! You have to hand it to them - what a beautiful scam.

Bitcoin solves the problem of having a few select people in control of creating the money tokens, which throughout history always results in them abusing their power and inflating the supply into hyperinflation. It's the initial form of the URV described in the article you mentioned!

As expected the URV ("Brazilian Real") was inflated away over time once the central bank got its hands on control of the issuance as can be seen in this graph: https://tradingeconomics.com/brazil/money-supply-m2

Because bitcoin's supply is hard limited - the decentralised nature ensures no one has the power to change the issuance curve, it's the initial form of the URV you mentioned, but the decentralised, proof-of-work paradigm means that it will stay like that _forever_. The more they print money, the more the price of bitcoin goes up.

Its energy paradigm is no different to gold's - having to put in work to dig up gold is what makes gold the hardest money we ever had (today gold mining still uses more energy than the bitcoin network). It's the most natural thing in the world that money tokens we use as "proof of work" require equivalent work to create. Any system that breaks that rule will ultimately be corrupted and fail. History has shown this over and over again.

Gold is a good way to store wealth because it is durable, of limited supply, dense in space and value, portable, fungible, dividable, identifiable, and universally valued now and for the foreseeable future.

Zimbabwean paper money is portable, fungible, dividable, and identifiable, but its performance on the other characteristics makes it it an overall poor way to store value.

All forms of government-created fiat money are in danger of going the way of Zimbabwean dollar. The issuing government can just decide to print more, thus devaluing the existing money.

Other ways of storing value have their own problems. Some people use land, but while land is potentially very valuable, it's not portable, fungible, or universally valuable. Businesses organized as corporations can be used to store value, and many people save for their retirement this way (by buying stocks). This has the benefit that in good times, the value of your investment can grow by itself. Unfortunately, it can also shrink by itself in bad times. Also, shares of corporations are not easily dividable.

My point is that forms of money (stored wealth) are not arbitrary.

Unlike the US dollars, gold can't simply be mined fast enough to reduce its values. Whereas with the US dollar, the US federal reserve can just print it, literally.

Gold is the money of the future, especially when the economic system finally collapse. Gold has been money for thousand of years for good reason.

Unless there are better form of money in a free market, gold is the best choice. Horde some of it.(Of course, don't convert your entire saving into gold, that's stupid.) It may leave you one of the last guy with real wealth after an economic collapse. It is the cork that float in an ocean of economic uncertainly.

This is of course, assuming that the government managed to outrun our economic productive capacity.

Paper currency is backed by a government promise. Of course, if people lose faith in a state or a government persistently debases the fiat currency, people will lose confidence in it. But as I've pointed out before, while there have been many hyperinflationary episodes, it's not that frequent of a problem relative to the number of countries and currencies in existence.

I'm going to take a guess and assume you mean gold, but if that isn't the case, I'm really curious to know.

The fact that people collectively agreed that gold was a good form of money has nothing to do with any intrinsic (or god given) value of gold. It had everything to do with certain properties of gold that made it a good medium of exchange. Namely, it's durable, portable, hard to counterfeit, malleable, etc.

Eventually, gold's cause was assisted by tradition. People have been using it to represent money for so long they mistakenly believe it has intrinsic value. (Granted, gold isn't a bad choice, if you are betting on the fact that others will irrationally value it.)

So yes, it's harder for governments to manipulate a gold-backed currency... but it's not that hard. The US effectively did it twice, most recently after WWI with the Gold Reserve Act. Also, your money supply is now open to manipulation by private entities and even individuals. Gold mining companies, for instance, would have powerful sway over the amount and price of gold.