> [the gold standard] is a terrible idea for civilizations that have technologies like accounting systems and currencies that are difficult to counterfeit. Tying economic expansion to the ability to mine and store one type of element doesn't make any sense.
Hear me out. I will first start a counterstatement with two supporting points (I'm sure it's easy to find more supporting points too, but let's keep this simple).
It is a terrible idea for a civilization that exists in a system with finite resources to use a currency that is unbounded and exponential. The disconnect between the nominal economic substrate and raw reality will lead to broad class theft and environmental destruction.
1. For class theft, don't just take my word for it, take Paul Krugman's: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...
"even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis."
Now, let's unpack what he says very carefully. In short it is this:
"we need to keep our society looking like it's humming by posting great employment numbers, and the most effective way to do this is to incrementally cheat the labor class out of the value of their wages"
2. As for environmental destruction, surely you can see how putting society on a compounding treadmill of devaluation encourages consumption as a driver of economic growth (if we fail to post a positive growth number, we WILL have at least a transient economic crisis), and it's patently evident that we buy more, shittier things that need to be replaced, because there is diminished opportunity cost for saving your money to buy something better and more robust: but hey, it's good for circular flow.
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Now, if you accept that an unbounded currency is terrible for a society in a finite resource regime - then, in the big picture it doesn't matter too terribly much what is restricting the expansion of the nominal basis[0]. What matters is that something restricts the expansion. If that's physical mining of metals, the capacity to expand the currency is soft-capped to a certain rate that flexes with real economic performance -- and hard-capped to the total amount of metal in the earth; if that's some digital ledger that can't be expanded, that would be fine too, but anyways the point is it's bounded.
Or, maybe you like environmental destruction and screwing the poor. If you do, you should probably say that up front, instead of hiding it behind difficult-to-unpack-ese like Krugman does.
[0] in the small, probably cryptocurrencies (which burn to make CO2) are better than mining, which dumps mercury effluent into the environment, and maybe there will even be efficient cryptocurrencies that burn up less CO2. But all are better than, say, an economic system that has the unboundedness property AND is propped up by paying off defense contractors that build depleted uranium tipped rounds that are dropped on civilians halfway around the world.