In the original post I read, "the IMF bashed Germany's adoption of the gold standard in the 1870s," yet we forget how quickly the German economy turned upside down around the 1920s. It may have been 50 years later, but things moved much more slowly within the area of economics. Globally, we had transitioned into the manufacturing era in the early 19th century and would be in that era for another 70 years. They needed a lot of help getting out of their recession, but it just goes to show the IMF is not always right or has the right view on a certain topic.

Let's fast forward to the current day. In recent months, the IMF has opened up to the concept of cryptocurrencies. There were some meetings or summits regarding monetary remittance in commercial banks with a creation of their own cryptocurrency. Each individual banking system is unique based on domestic regulations and given economic conditions, so it may not be legal in some countries, but it does introduce the concept of a completely virtual system. Of course, no system is too good or too big to fail, but looking at Germany adopting the gold standard and then letting it go is definitely one of the earlier examples. Main point is that we will need some sort of reserve bailout in this global economy if it were to collapse. Some central banks have had to bail out struggling countries like the ECB with respect to Greece's situation.

Many banking systems had gold as their choice, but there are other options especially within the world of cryptocurrency. Some coins or tokens are backed by stock within a company so they're like a utility instead of traditional gold-backed fiat currencies. I recently attended an AMA session hosted by some blockchain startups and they seemed to be attached to an alternate standard of backing their tokens as a utility. These tokens can be used on their platform and It is a rather new concept, but still similar to this gold standard requirement like most believe that we need. If each unit of currency was backed by a gold standard, there would be a much larger vault space needed for the actual gold whether it be for fiat or crypto compared to the days when Germany and the US had their respective gold standards.

Well that's my two (or three) cents, but let's just keep in mind that there is no perfect or completely fail-proof system especially with a shift toward cryptocurrencies. Maybe the IMF also missed the mark on cryptocurrencies and it doesn't have the right amount of centralization needed to move forward successfully. Only time will tell...