Don't get me wrong, there were days when the paranoid fever dreams of borderline schizophrenics clearly belonged to the realms of unreality. But those days are gone. I miss them, but pretending they are still with us won't help.
Take the pizza-parlor related conspiracy theories from a few years back. Thanks to the revelations concerning the late great J. Epstein, we know they were for the most part wrong. Except, for the part where a significant portion of the ruling class regularly engages in sex with underage girls.
The quacks were wrong about everything except the most essential part of the story.
I can give you other examples, if you wish, but few are as prominent and as unarguable as this one.
Silver is/was more practical. The U.S. was on a silver standard until the Nixon administration.
The lack of silver also lead the British to start the opium trades to get around the Chinese state.
"All of the gold discovered thus far would fit in a cube that is 23 meters wide on every side."
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world
I'd even guess you could keep it in a form of bank and then have a debit card you could use where most items were tiny tiny fractions of an oz. Is it still too little gold at that point?
I'm not suggesting a gold standard btw...just curious. I'd also point out that it might be crazy, but our current system seems incredibly risky and many nations have had their currency collapse through over supply. I don't think a perfect solution exists here.
I just counted and there are exactly 6 $1 bills in my wallet that have been in there for I don't even know how long.
That being said, the main problem with silver/gold was the government pegging their value to each other causing 'issues'.
Especially since the gold standard did nothing to help in stabilizing currencies:
* https://archive.ph/FWKcL / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-the...
Is not an hedge against inflation:
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789
even over the long-term, per Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976:
> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.
* PDF: http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram...
* Via: https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/
Having a fixed currency base can turn economic downturns much worse, as happen in the Great Depression:
* http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11482
With countries only starting to recover once they left it:
* https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-grea...