i have a VERY good imagination.   

i agree with this.  i'm sure you're aware of Ellen Brown's work.

N. Dakota has totally bypassed the recession by forming the Bank of N. Dakota owned by the people and for the people.  Every state needs this as it would yank power away from the Fed and Federal gov't.

It was just an example. I don't think it's 20:1 either. It's most likely between 25-50:1


It has, and it will retain that aspect. I expect Mexico and certain other regions that are richer in silver than gold to support silver more readily, at least domestically. Western nations are another story.

Private parties can make use of gold or silver for exchange right now. A main barrier is convenience - it's easier to exchange dollars, Euros, or whatever other medium is more convenient. This applies mostly to western nations. Use as a transactional medium isn't the issue; use as a means of saving is.

If metal is going to sit for a long time, 10x or more in storage costs is not reasonable. Consider the amount of storage expansion that would be necessary to house official reserves. Can you imagine how much bigger Ft. Knox or West Point would have to be to accommodate 10x the physical material? Even a 50:50 mix of gold:silver reserves would require facilities 25x the size. Space is the premium even over cost, not to mention rapidly escalating security measures that rise with the area involved.

There is nothing that guarantees a bi-metal stance. Only real market forces, which cannot be ignored, but can be delayed. Eventually, silver may surpass gold in reserves. Even platinum or rhodium may come to be used more readily.

The difference is incentive. Imagine this scenario: Facebook decides that it will only release an app for iPhone and announces this. With hundreds of millions of users, how many people will take into consideration availability of the FB app for their next phone purchase? It will assuredly not be an insignificant number.

Now imagine that I control the supply of diamonds, a la De Beers. Western governments announce that diamonds and fiat currencies may be used for transactions, and anything else will be penalized, with rewards paid for reporting unauthorized forms of payment. How many sheeple will use anything other than diamonds and fiat?

Replace diamonds with silver. How many people will use gold? Now reverse the two. How many people will use silver? The incentive structure favors one over the other, and the social herd will avoid pain to seek the path of least resistance so they can continue to eat, breed, and avoid introspection. It's a very well-examined, emergent psychosocial pattern. It's been analyzed, modeled, tested, and manipulated. It'll always be limited by fundamental factors in the end, but it can go against them until exhausted. Don't fight the flow.

Again your making an assumption that silver wouldn't be used as an official currency.  It always has been historically, no reason for it not to be in the future, your argument that storage is too much is just silly, its a drop in the bucket 1/10000th of the value of the metal, silver was stored as a store of value for the last few thousand years, what exactly has changed?? 

Utah passed a bill to accept.. wait for it gold AND SILVER...  as legal currency..   Not just gold, as you argue is how it will be done in the future.. It's just silly to assume that only gold will be used

I know


It doesn't matter whether the Federal Reserve system is in place, or public banking. Replacing the banking system is different from replacing the currency unit. Banking is separate from, and rests atop the foundational monetary unit. Distribute the banking system however you want, but unless control of the base money is distributed as well, then to be blunt - you may as well be pissing in the wind.

Precious metals act as a fundamental force, limiting banking from becoming overly reckless. The same is occurring in the Bitcoin system: exchanges, lending and depository functionality is being built using Bitcoin as a base.


It's the last thing I want, but like a race condition, the financial system has gone past the point of being able to stop the runaway process of inflation before it causes major problems.

A crash is inevitable, but an attempt at throwing an exception is being made. The problem is that the exception being thrown is resulting in more of a BSoD than a drop to a CLI with an error.

There are other servers running, so the slack will be picked up. I still wouldn't want to be on one of the crashed ones, even if they don't look like they've crashed.

For the record, I'm down with chodpaba and cypherdoc on this one.

My love/hate relationship with gold has a reasonable significant 'hate' component because I fear the potential for gold to be used even more distructively than our current fiat regimes.

I will state again that I like distributed crypto-currency solutions along the lines of the trail blazed by Bitcoin the best from a theoretical point of view because it can fail if it is abused by those who have achieved the power to do so.

From a practical standpoint, a publicly owned banking system run as a service to the citizens of a political state seems the most tenable near-term solution.  I 'one world currency' with no cash alternative is, I fear, the most likely near term outcome however.

how's the first attempt at that working out?  uh, Euuuuro...

that's probably one of the few good points you've made around here.  thanks! 

This is a good point, assuming that the Federal government would ever give up fiat...  (roflmao)  

The US treasury does actually have silver reserves, however they are very small compared to gold.