I love it!

As for the cap gains, well there’s the rub. Oh, wait, didn’t I mention my new Irish citizenship and the Cayman Islands account???

N.B. IRS snoops – I’m KIDDING!!

That’s not true. Clearing houses and credit (to smooth out variations) can remove much of the physical movement of metal. If the net change is a small percentage of the total volume of transactions, then shipping costs won’t play a large part.

Except every trade is going to cost you. 10 dollars per trade. In addition to that you have to pay taxes on any gains.

You’d win if there was hyper inflation. But if too many people do it then the government will simply break the system. Make it illegal for private individuals to own gold or just screw it up somehow. I wonder how trustworthy giving money to ‘SPD’ actually is.

It’s a lovely idea though. Worth doing more research on.

In that light the answer to the second question….

Perhaps they would open up an entreprenurial opportunity for private cash?

No. If they you try to make your own money then the government will throw you into a concrete cage or, failing that, kill you.

Ok, this accnt offers me a debit/credit card.

I go to the store, buy a frozen pizza and am charged $8.00. This is debited from my accnt. GLD is at $104.00. the next day, same thing but GLD is at $106.00. Debit is less in terms of GLD.

Have I not put myself on the gold standard? And cashless to boot????

Sure. All I’m saying is that in the rush to a cashless society, some private activity could slip through the cracks.

Instead what happened was that governments took control of money and standardized it in order to (firstly) tax effectively and (secondly) to manipulate it. It was a common occurance, even with Gold currency, to devalue money.

For example: When a New King was put in office they would require all the money in the land to be reforged into the likeliness of the new king. (or some other major event that allowed the excuse of creating new money). You gave the government 4 gold coins to be re-struck and you’d get 4 gold coins back… however the gold coins you got back weighed slightly less then the ones you dropped off. The government kept the difference and used that to strike new coins.

Of course with abandoning of the gold standard in 1970′s our government has given up all pretense of having a stable money supply. So now they can manipulate currency valuations to their hearts content with no practical restrictions on spending.

If the USA Government decided to stop threatening to kill anybody who wanted to make their own money then it would just go back to what it naturally would be: commodity money. Like Gold or Silver or maybe something else. Whatever the market is willing to accept.

Maybe we reached enough level in accounting technology that we can track the relative values of various commodities without having to need a intermediate commodity to serve as a common medium of exchange for everything. I can imagine people on the stock market trading stocks directly for bonds or commodity futures or whatever based directly on relative value rather then Gold or some other solid currency.

The idea that the use of credit cards would prevent a 100% gold standard from returning is a non sequitur argument.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20070015-93/nfc-mobile-payments-could-hit-$50-billion-by-2014/

These are generally good developments.