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Originally Posted by schola  There were drawbacks but at least it was dependable, predictable and harder to manipulate.
It's hard to counterfeit gold money. It has real value directly connected to the physical labor it took to dig it out of the ground. It's harder, but not impossible, to control the supply of it. |
Dependable? Inflation and deflation still occurred. Gold or metal money was constantly manipulated by filing down the edges of a gold coin you were able to "create money". I believe that at times this got to be so bad that all financial transactions would be done with a scale.
How could you possibly control the discover of gold? You can't, if there is ever a huge discover there would be massive inflation. Lastly, gold is currently traded around $850 an ounce, total amount of gold mined in the history of the world is estimated at 142,000 tons according to wikipedia. Thus, there isn't enough gold to replace paper money. This world is ever growing in abundance and I suspect that for a gold standard to make sense you would need to increase the gold quantity by the same percentage as population growth.
Look at wikipedia, read a few books. I am not saying fiat currency is great, but many of the problems you think it solves, it doesn't.