A Post-Fiat World...
Last night, I started to think as one of the things I'm asking of the universe to make possible (honest weights and measures of money). We need to mentally prepare ourselves to see what money based on gold/silver would look like in daily transactions for essentials and bills.
I'm not exactly sure on how this would work, especially if silver gets so rare from industrial use that you can live on less than an ounce per year (warning; I have absolutely no clue as to future valuation for living expenses). I don't know if a drop of a metal would be inserted as a permanent disk into the middle of a base coin with weights markings (like so many micrograms of silver or fractions of an ounce). I have thought about how, if the current civilization infrastructure like telephone cables and fiber optics and everything else survives the transition to a gold/silver currency, you would be writing a check or using a debit card for your bank account to pay in gold or silver.
What I envision being necessary is that the banks of today would have to modify itself to not have any paper money, nor any lending services to prevent fractional reserve lending. Instead, the bank would serve as a warehousing service, strictly. That way, you deposit your metal for safety/convenience, so that you can draw off it electronically and by check as needed. You pay for the warehousing service as you would a storage fee for your RV or babysitting for your child. It is assumed by this time that the government is very different and has a different tack on things by this time. You MIGHT be able to construct loans of gold and silver to be paid back at a future time, and this would only happen between individuals. That is for another topic.
What does going to the grocery store look like? Well, when you have your things scanned, the cashier will ask how you are paying for this. You would respond with gold or silver, as that would determine the price in weight (there will be no "so-many-dollars per ounce" - it would be like a 5-lbs bag of apples would be worth so many milligrams of silver or gold (31,103 per troy ounce)). Then she tells you that the total is, say 531 milligrams of silver. You then write a check or swipe your card for that amount. I don't know if the monetary standard would be based on so many milligrams, so many micrograms, or what, but in the case of milligrams, you would be writing in a little over 62,206 milligrams of silver if you deposited 2 troy ounces into your account in the deposits column of your checkbook register. In the payments column, you would be writing in 531 milligrams to be subtracted from your account for those apples. You would see on your receipt something like:
<Kroger trademark>
1234 7543 3456 865 023
SILVER
GALA APPLES 5 lbs 531
WATERMELON LARGE SEEDLESS 1,342
ORG BRAEBURN APPLES 2.4 LBS 432
SALE TOTAL 2,305 mg
Again, I have no clue how much those apples would cost in silver or gold once we can make it through to the other side of a civilization based on honest weights and measures. If you paid the amount in gold, it would say "GOLD" under the transaction code near the top.
I want to see people start to think about just what would a post-fiat world would look like in daily transactions. If you have a different vision as to how it will work, post it.
