Why does the method of mining mean that a currency should not be accepted?
Gold serves as a currency yet the methods of mining have changed drastically in the last 1,000 years.
Gold serves as a currency yet the methods of mining have changed drastically in the last 1,000 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
I'm not a gold bug and I see many problems with using gold as a currency, namely that the amount of currency in circulation should depend on how much stuff we can dig out of the ground. (In the case of BTC something about how many times a SHA-256 hash can be calculated.)
The idea that gold fell out of use as currency because of industrialization is either a completely new discovery in economics, or completely wrong. I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
Not for the last 80 years it hasn't..
TL;DR: only outside the US, only to Central Banks.
At a national level, yes the Central Banks settled in gold, but that was after the micro transactions bubbled up to be settled from the commercial banks and then eventually cleared at the Central Bank level (Talking on the edges of my understanding here - just trying to see if the reality for an individual level was the currency was gold backed until 71).
Yes, "effectively gold-backed" until the first guy came along to openly demand an actual physical (rather than "potential") exchange of USD reserves for real ounces, in size, from the US. Bam, Nixon shock. Essentially "caused" by one "individual Frenchman" (de Gaulle) testing whether the system can in fact, in size and in physical actuality consistently deliver what it promised to the world.