You can just exchange gold and bitcoins at whatever rate you specify.

But that's what governments did. They specified exchange rates and expected people to believe that they held as much gold as the currency in circulation represented.

You are asking the wrong question. Gold didn't back money, gold was the money. And when people started to warehouse it in bank vaults they got receipt which they started trading as if it was gold itself. Later governments through laws and enforcement through force established a monopoly on these paper receipts, gave them names and proclaimed how much weight is represented with a certain number. For instance in the beginning of the 19th century $20 was redeemable for 1oz of gold.

So the phrase "backed by gold" was miss-used ever since the governments grabbed the monopoly on money. The last country where this happened was the USA in 1913 when the FED was created. Before the FED dollars were basically although government issued receipts for gold. But with the FED it soon changed to legal tender which it is today.


Basically the important point to take away from post is that gold is money. And that paper money was just suppose to have made it's trade easier. So when you're looking at BitCoins you cannot have it "backed by gold" because they are two different commodities and the most that you can have is open free trade between the two. Eventually I suspect will get to a very stable and constant price of gold in BitCoins and vice versa.

Actually it is, but it is developing now, the new currency namel Gold, russian company GoldMint is going to release it in Q2 2018, check their white paper if interested it that kind of investments.

"backed" means that if you have (1 unit of currency) be it one dollar, euro, or pound I can exchange it for 1 oz of gold .. now, later or after 10 years and still get that 1 oz or 1 gram of gold.

no currency as far as I know promises that it would pay the equivalent of gold in the future, instead you get the current market price for GBP/GOLD or EUR/GOLD  for a currency to be backed by gold it would be EUR=GOLD

For bitcoin to be backed by gold, this has to be accepted: total bitcoin supply = total gold supply

171,300,000 KG of gold = 21,000,000 BTC

which will equal almost (8 KG) per (1 Bitcoin)

and to really back it by gold, governments will have accept the exchange of bitcoin for their gold reserves.

Have you heard of gold-backed cryptos? Here's an interesting ICO that I found.

Kinesis is a yield-bearing digital currency based on 1:1 allocated physical gold and silver. The vision for Kinesis is to deliver an evolutionary step beyond any monetary and banking system available today. It is a globally accessible, usable and reliable digital currency forming the basis of a new Monetary System.

Is this the future of money? Find out more on their website. https://kinesis.money/#/

nor what. The gold standard for maintaining gold money was abolished in 1952 (if I'm not confused) at the Bretton woods conference.

I do not think that there are any currencies in the world now that are backed by gold.Most of the countries have taken their currencies out of the gold standard and make it fiat money which are issued by the governments that is why most nations are in debts now and struggling to deal with them.

You can't backup bitcoin with gold because that will stuck the price and bitcoin would lose that volatility, and gold standard doesn't work at all, we already see it fail once, why should we adopt that model if we realized it doesn't work. That would be non sense.

What we can do is to have a QR code on a gold coin, in that QR have a private key with an addy with 1btc, that would be fun, the double value coin