I find it highly ironic that the crowd which blasts the dollar for being valued far in excess of its intrinsic worth is the same crowd that champions gold and silver, two metals (especially gold) that are valued grossly in excess of their intrinsic worth. The industrial demand for gold take alone would place its price at only a fraction of a fraction of where it currently is, and the same goes for silver (which is why it's historically traded around the $5 mark, except when bandwagons form).
There is no such thing as 'intrinsic worth'. All value is a subjective calculation. Gold is worth what someone will trade for it. The same thing is true about steel, mercury, salt or real estate. The fact that gold & silver are both valued well beyond what their market price would be absent their monetary value is entirely irrelevent. Actually, that is also an argument for gold over any industrial commodity, including silver, since the establishment of a commodity backed currency upon an industrial input is going to increase the market value of that same commodity beyond it's industrial value because someone will always choose to store some of it for it's monetary/capital preservation characteristics. Thus increasing monetary demand. This means that gold, having few industrial uses, is ideal as a monetary base even lacking it's 5K year history of same. For a monetary crisis would be unlikely to upset the supply of any industrial inputs. Do the same for mercury, (or any of the 'rare earth' elements) and products that depend upon those inputs functionally become out of reach economicly. CFL's require trace amounts of mercury in their manufacturing processes. Good or bad, they would not be possible as a consumer product under a mercury standard. Many forms of vaccines, until recently, required trace amounts of mercury as part of a perservative. A mercury standard might have cut millions of lives short due to polio and whatever else if it had existed over the past 100 years.