Texas moves to create gold-backed digital currency

Yes, direct trade may definitely be grains, alcohol or bullets - but as soon as economies more complex than a self sufficient farm village crop up, eventually some form of token will be required.

For that, historically gold and silver have been the established tokens of choice for millennia, and even today's currencies are backed by insane amounts of gold in central bank vaults - it's not a bad assumption per se to think that gold and silver will outlast even our modern civilization. Come to think of it, most of the world's currencies sans the Swiss Franc and the US dollars are barely decades old.

We're already seeing a switch from the US dollar as the universally accepted international reserve and trading currency - only 60% of reserves and 40% of trades are valued in dollars, mostly towards the Euro and, in smaller amounts, yen, yuan and a bit of Francs. Think forward a few decades... what humans create can vanish in a very short time.

Well leaving the gold standard certainly helped countries start recovering from the Great Depression:

> In the end, recovery from the Great Depression does not begin until countries give up on the combination of the Bagehot Rule and of commitment to sound gold-standard finance. Those countries that have central banks willing to print up enough money so that people are willing to spend it--it is when you adopt such policies that your economy begins to recover. If you don’t, you become France, which sticks to the gold standard all the way up to 1937, and never gets a recovery. When World War II begins, Nazi Germany’s production--equal to France's in 1933--had doubled between 1933 and 1939. French production had fallen by 15%.

* https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/the-great-depression-...

Ideally having neither too much nor too little money circulating is best, but it's impossible to do that, so it's better to have a little too much, as having too little hampers your economy:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine

    - a system of independent, redundant audits of the reserves (independent as in: they would not live in Texas)
    - a blockchain to track and record for all eternity the state of the currency *and* the audits
    - a guarantee etched in stone in the Texas constitution that the e-currency is - by law - instantly convertible to the real thing (and by that, I mean actual gold, not the current market rate equivalent in toilet paper).

But again, there are so many ways to cheat and lie when you manage a gold "reserve", including storing fake gold, that - indeed - while this would be a lot easier to handle and trade with than real gold, it would still not replace it.