It's a decentralized store of wealth but not a decentralized currency.
Because it doesn't work as a currency without centralization. (Not anymore anyways, in a digital/internet era.)
"Gold as currency" advocates, like the good people of goldmoney.com and like the Peter Schiffs of the world etc, will say someone can hold the gold and then issue you a ledger you can spend from using a debit card or whatever. Simple, right?
It's like the best of both worlds magically had a baby, until you think about it for a second.
It's not decentralized. It's not without the cost of paying them to do this for you, and then trusting them to hold the gold.
If this were actually the way of the future, it means the future would be riddled with all these centralized points of stress, where we need to account for and guard the money.
It's literally not possible for gold to be commonly used currency without centralization.
And then you'll always have a motivation for thieves. For conventional thieves, but also for government systems or other organized crime to either re-form or not go away. (The more you can centralize wealth, the better the landscape for people who want to steal.)
So even besides the direct cost of people stealing the gold, there's an implied cost of what happens when the world is setup for thieves to do well.
It seems so quintessentially "minarchist" rather than actually principled or what really makes intuitive sense.
Minarchist ideas are funny to me, because they're convinced that they're like the "practical" ones.
But then when you stop and consider it, it's the most bizarrely impractical thing anyone could possibly dream up.
Like, sure, the world won't become anarchic overnight. But the trend is towards that and eventually it can stick, where we no longer tolerate systems of aggression and they fade. Trying to contract the US government into something that exists but only builds fire stations and kindly stores the gold for everyone is not practical.
That's not ever happening. Lol.
Please, go prove to me how practical and worldly you are, I'd love to see it.
You may as well be intellectually consistent, because your compromise is absurdly less practical than the ideal anyways.
And it seems pretty similar with Bitcoin and gold.
Sure, the world adopting a decentralized currency like Bitcoin is probably decades or generations away. But it's actually practical, whenever the understanding is there and we're ready for it, whereas gold becoming the ubiquitous currency is fundamentally not a viable thing.
Asking people to painstakingly watch over your gold and then issue you digital ledger units is absurdly expensive and not practical. We're never doing that. The world economy is not ever going to flow from that.
Gold had its era as the dominant currency. Gold is still a store of wealth (and I don't doubt that it's a decent idea to own some). Gold probably always will maintain some role as money, if only as a fallback in case of internet outage*. But it's insane to think it's workable for gold to be the commonly used currency.
*Austrian theory explains why gold has monetary value. But this shouldn't be conflated with the idea that it necessarily has to be the #1 form of it in all circumstances. It can have a secondary or even a niche role, and the Austrian teachings of what gives it this role are still true. Austrian theory isn't trying to say that nothing else could ever work better.
