How much gold do you need? How many gold dealers are there around the world? Don't they generally have several dozen to a few hundred ounces available most of the time, even in poorer countries?

Do you walk around with wads of cash in your pocket, just in case you need to buy a condo on a whim? Why would you have to do the same with gold?

If I want to transfer my gold assets from Calgary to Quito, I can contact my gold dealer and have him get in touch with a Quito dealer. If he has a contact there already, great - there's a trusted network already set up. If not, he can inform the Quito dealer how much I purchased and then digitally exchange the balance using a contemporary currency.

When I go to Quito, I can either pick up my metal from the dealer there or keep it there in storage for a fee if that service is offered. Either way, my gold has moved without moving. If I need to move tons at a time, there would simply have to be larger nodes involved as close as possible to the destination.

In a stable worldwide economy, moving that much around would be exceedingly rare, especially with gold revalued into the tens of thousands of dollars level. How often would most people need to transfer an ounce at a value of an average American's yearly salary. Using Bitcoin instead of fiat for transfer would be more reliable, safer, and definitely faster for large amounts.

A global financial system with gold integrated into it is viable now just using gold dealers - not even banks. The physical asset doesn't have to move but locally!

Ya.  In my dream fantasy-land, a multitude of crypto-currencies are constantly growing, shrinking, being born, dying, and most importantly, evolving.

The peeps choose freely what they want to uses.  Cornering and abuse of a particular crypto-currency would hasten it's demise into the dustbin of history, and the a-holes who ruined it would be out whatever it cost them to get in in the first place.

Merged mining could tie the crypto-currencies together tightly enough so that they all realized certain benefits complements of the group, but not so tightly than any one really effected any other in a tangible way.

This is the picture I was trying to paint with the 'bakcoin' idea.

The cost of moving gold isn't very high, international wires aren't free either..  I can't imagine that at all, if you can't settle up on the spot, then you probably shouldn't be making the purchase..  

ok??  and how does that mean that if your a default risk you shouldn't be required to settle on the spot??

Go lend Dank some BTC if you think everyone should be given credit..

So kick up the value of gold to match the worldwide economy/developement level...  Its just a means to keep score, if that much weight of gold is required to settle up for smaller transactions obviously the value of gold is too low..  Oh wait we have.. gold is 1600 an ounce now, not 30..

Markets sometimes follow rumors more than reality... Should your cost of doing business really be exposed to a 10% rise if someone plants a few false seeds in the media?  Sure, it's no worse than the current situation, I'm just saying Bitcoin would be superior and thus eventually it will win out as long as the internet and globalized trading continue.

yup.. Have you ever heard of identity theft, chargebacks, wire fraud??

All of these enumerated problems and many more can go out the window with a well regulated cashless one-world currency and adequate biometric and individual tracking solutions.

I'm looking forward (with horror) to these selling points to be massively popular with a majority of my fellow peeps.  And those who are in need of corp/gov assistance for their basic necessities of life probably won't even need to have an opinion on the matter.

Effectively. Gold as a relatively stationary reserve distributed globally; Bitcoin as a trinary money.

I use the term trinary because Bitcoin satisfies Triffin's dilemma, acting simultaneously and indefinitely as a Store of Value and Means of Exchange, with the resulting effect of being a reliable Metric of Value.

how likely is it for the Internet to go down?  wasn't it designed to withstand a nuclear war?

a gold layer adds too much complexity, ironically.