i have a good feeling that most of western countries backed by gold keeping wealthy elite families will end up making cryptocurrencies illegal. just like torrent network is being attacked now. in uk in the past year most of torrent hosted websites have been blocked. but i assume that they will shoot themselves in the foot as rest of the world will continue to develop in growth by using cryptocurrencies and drifting away from dollar/euro/pound. at that point wars might start just to restore the use of banking systems there and making cryptocurrencies illegal worldwide. we can speculate all day here - lets wait and see. im very interested to follow the world development after people taken control of their wealth.
The gold standard no longer exists, no western country has it's currency or economy backed by gold any longer. Both the USD and GBP are backed by confidence - confidence in the system, confidence in the ability to use a USD or a GBP to buy a good. As confidence erodes , the value erodes. To restore confidence the Fed and Bank of England (and now the Bank of Japan) have embarked on money printing exercises which have the impact of providing "free" money which is then used to buy assets that post a return. This has reinforced confidence but has had the impact of creating new asset bubbles. If those asset bubbles unwind sharply then once again confidence in the system will be questioned.