Texas moves to create gold-backed digital currency

What's the motive behind wanting deflationary currency?

Just a few minutes' reflection should convince you that's a very bad idea for any free market, capitalist economy.

This is Texas. Why gold and not barrels of oil?

That's one of the crazier political rabbit holes to go down. There are reasonable and/or reasonable-sounding arguments for pretty much every position and those arguments have been rehashed in every imaginable way for decades and decades. Online there's probably tens of gigabytes of debate between "hard money" advocates and "fiat" or inflationary currency advocates.

After seeing endless debates between various schools of economics for decades, in the end I've come to the conclusion that nobody really knows what they're talking about.

A big problem is that history is an experiment with no replications, no controls, and no good way to tie complex causes to complex effects. "What would the past 100 years have looked like had we kept the dollar pegged to gold?" We don't know and we'll never know. All you can do is tell just-so stories. Did having an inflationary currency help us achieve the remarkable growth of the past hundred years? We can't know that either. For all we know all that growth was due to demographics and technology and would have happened regardless of the monetary system.

I wonder if maybe it doesn't matter that much, and so in that sense both sides are wrong. Maybe the real basis of the economy is the real economy (people, capital, resources, technology) and what you use to price it is secondary. So as long as your monetary system avoids extreme failure modes like hyperinflation or extreme deflationary collapse, the system will just adapt to whatever monetary base it's given and price signals will do their job.

Texas is a pretty odd place.

IANAL, but doesn't Article I, Section 10 of the US Constitution[0] bar Texas from creating such a currency?

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S10-C1-2...