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Utah Goldback

Writer's picture: jackychcjackychc

For most people, spend most of their lifetime in work to earn money. Very likely, those money would be deposited into the bank, some people would invest their money in some companies buy some bonds, or in real estates, or forex and commodities. But many of them would just open a term deposit and earn less than or around 2% p.a. interest.

However, the money you deposited into the bank is very likely to lose purchasing power as the interest rate most likely below the inflation, and your money loss value gradually.

Furthermore, as we can see multiple times in history, the value of money fluctuate a lot, sometimes completely losing its value, like Zimbabwe Dollar or the half-a-century long devaluation of Argentine Peso / Brazilian Real, and even the Greenback lost their value gradually.

Many people wanted to move away from fiat currency and use gold instead.

However, there is a major problem: even if we made a gold coin a size of US cent or Japanese 1 Yen, or 1 eurocent. The mint value of those coins is probably at least 100 USD, which is not commonly used in daily purchase.

Even the most commonly used gold coin in the old days (1850s-1900s) , including the Gold Sovereign by UK, 20 Francs by France or Switzerland, 5 US Dollars Gold etc, the mint value is somewhere around 300 to 400 USD.

So some people in Utah, make a currency out of gold by printing gold on a sheet and backed by more gold.

A unit in goldback represents 1/1000th troy ounce of gold and the exchange rate is determined by the cost of making a goldback and the gold it has,

I think this is an ingenious idea, because it solved the biggest problem of using gold as currency, dividing it into a meaning portion that can be spend in daily life.

However, it does not solve the century old problem of coin clipping, as it is possible to extract gold from the goldback note, one could possibly undermine the system by removing some gold content from a note, then spend them at full value.

Another problem is the premium, 1/1000th troy ounce of gold is now worth around 1.8 USD, but the exchange rate for goldback is somewhere around 2.7 USD, which has a considerable premium.



Nonetheless, this make a good souvenir or gift for friends.

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