Gold Backs for In Person Purchases

Bitcoin: a better gold?

One of Bitcoin's greatest virtues apart from its distribution being a convergent series, being proof of work and being decentralized is the ability to transfer value electronically over the internet without a third party or bank. Certainly without this virtue Bitcoin would have been stopped dead in its tracks. As we saw with E-gold more than twenty years ago.

When purchasing with Bitcoins in person, each person has to carry a smart phone which by its nature of being with a battery exposes the user to microwave radiation. More radiation is emitted via the connections over Wifi or mobile connection. The Internet connection exposes the smartphone user to track and tracing. The location data gathered by just being on the Internet reveals the user's location to a surprising precision. Bitcoin itself leaves a paper trail without names on the open ledger. The addresses can be linked to real identities whenever they go through an exchange. Lightning helps mitigate these issues somewhat. However, when you do not have access to the Internet, both Bitcoin on its blockchain and Bitcoin over lightning will be unavailable.

Bitcoin private keys can be put on pieces of paper, but you have to trust everyone who has ever had that bill not to steal the coins from the private keys. You can have a trusted issuer with time locks (I designed this some time ago), but you end up having to trust the issuer to sign when the time lock expires and issue you new paper bitcoins. This centralizes issuance of the paper form of Bitcoin and makes those trying help the community a target to the same kinds of people who shutdown E-gold.

The Original Privacy Coin

Imagine this new coin. No blockchain, no reverse transactions, and no double spend problem. It's called "cash".

People are so used to having a single currency which can be in person and now that Bitcoin has replaced the bank when it comes to savings I now have to think about exchange rates and there is a loss in value when going from in person money (dollars) to internet money (Bitcoin). Hive Dollars solves the unit of account problem, but you still lose value when moving from US dollars to Hive Dollars.

The hidden Cost of the same Unit of Account

There is a cost to a teller provider to trade paper dollars into some other form of money (including electronic dollars). I wouldn't want to do that for free on a full-time basis, so I consider it an artificial artifact of the fiat system that we don't lose some value converting from in-person paper money to crypto-currency.

The fiat inflation that makes banking viable subsidizes this.

When I am out and about, some Bitcoin exchanges provide a card where you can go and spend with it wherever VISA is accepted. The money remains as crypto until you spend it. So I don't need to convert my crypto into pesos until the last minute - literally. There is a privacy issue with this, though.

Enter Gold Backs

Gold is normally heavy, and it's too valuable for everyday purchases. Converting $1 worth of gold into a cube shaped object would result in a cube which was 0.3 mm in size along each dimmention. This is definitely an impractical size to work with and coins which would be larger would end up being thin enough to cut people.

The Gold Backs are manufactured bearer instruments which are made with gold.

Gold Back main site: https://www.goldback.com/

Gold Back Art Gallery: https://www.goldback.com/goldback-art-gallery

These beautiful notes printed with Gold and covered with polymer on both faces look even more stunning in the videos on the site. These are the one Gold Back denominations. There are different designs for every denomination. The value floats in price and are sold for more than double the price of the gold with in them. They are far more easy to validate than 0.3 mm cubes of gold. The denominations are 1, 5, 10, 25 and 50 Gold Backs currently valued at about $4, $20, $40, $100, and $200 USD. The amount of gold in each bills is proportional to the denomination of the bill. For example, there is five times as much gold in a 25 Gold Back than a 5 Gold Back. There is five times as much gold in a five Gold Back than a one Gold Back.

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