tldr; The gold standard won't come back because the government would not be able to print trillions of fictional dollars whenever they want.
All the things we value vary over time relative to each other. Given that, why should we arbitrarily pick one and say that it is the foundation of our currency? Why should the price of bread fluctuate wildly to accommodate gold speculators?
1) relatively hard to counterfeit 2) scarce enough that carrying enough in your pocket to equate to significant value is convenient 3) Durable 4) Fungible 5) The supply generally expanded at a slow and predictable rate (this wasn't always the case -- the Spanish conquests, e.g., set off a devastating round of inflation when all that gold got shipped back home).
Silver and copper were also widely used.
Platinum-group metals would work, but weren't widely known to the ancients.
Crude oil: bulky and volatile. Helium: same as crude oil, but even more so (you'd need to haul around pressure tanks) Land: not portable. Not easily fungible. Drinking water: bulky.
Gold was a pragmatic choice.
In some of James Blish's SF stories, they used semiconductor-grade metals.
My real question is why gold should back our currency now. How does it make sense in a modern economy? We've divorced our currency from any one commodity, and I think that's a very good thing, because it helps to protect us from changes in the price of commodities.
I've always wondered this: Without gold (or something) backing a currency, what stops the printing of trillions and trillions, aggressively devaluing the currency out there?
What stops you from maxing out all the credit you can get and then walking away? Same basic situation. Nothing stops you, but you'll likely end up bankrupt and regardless you'll have a hard time getting credit again.
It seems trillions of dollars were printed with very little negative impact. How can that be?
I think a lot of the impact was reduced by the fact that the money supply is already very large, and also by the fact that much of the new money didn't really enter the public currency supply. e.g. Buying a block of bad mortgages from a bank probably doesn't affect much. The bank was already treating this as a real asset, borrowing against it, etc.
Yup, the best kind of gambling the kind where you rig the game so you always win. There's nothing worse than pesky fluctuations to impede constant winning.
Next thing we'll change the free market to guarantee goods can always be sold for a certain price, irrelevant of demand.. oh hang on.
One day they woke up and said "The denarian will now contain X grams of silver, rather than X+N grams. Oh and btw, all those contracts we wrote that said we'd pay you 100 coins, yeah, you're getting paid in the new denomination".
These dollars we speak of truly must be fictional if some people have to work their entire lives to get 500 000 of them, while others can just "make" trillions on a whim to avoid having negative dollars.