Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Hypothetical Bitcoin clone except backed by gold
by
markm
on 10/07/2011, 01:53:42 UTC
As already stated, you can simply "back" bitcoins with gold yourself by offering to sell gold for bitcoins.

You don't need a whole separate blockchain for that.

Which is good because if miners are spending their money on gold instead of electricity and hashinh-hardware the blockchain might be quite vulnerable to attack by anyone who chooses to invest in computing gear instead of gold.

As to it not making sense to back a currency with a currency, well, maybe it doesn't need to make sense. What is a 'reserve currency' but backing in one currency for another?

There are a whole bunch of blockchain-based currencies looking at all these concepts precisely because they do want to "back" their currencies. Part of how they plan to do that is to each buy a whole bunch of each of the others, so that all of them have a decent amount of "float" to use to buy back their own using any of the others.

If you would like to "back" one or more of them by selling gold for them, instead of or as well as "backing" bitcoin by selling gold for bitcoin, I doubt they will object. Heck they might even "back" your gold by buying it with various currencies not only with goldcoin...

Come to think of it, United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB) might for traditional reasons like to be "backed" by silver, How much silver would you sell for one UKB?

-MarkM-