The way I read it, this isn’t really about being able to pay with gold, this is about setting up electronic payment platforms that pretend to pay with gold. Which may or may not actually exist in some bank vault or other. Seems like a golden opportunity for grifters.
Just like it was the last time this was tried:
I know I’ve said this before, but all these digital currency cranks seem to be speedrunning the reasons behind every single banking regulation.
Some people seem convinced that gold has some kind of “real” value, while dollars only have value because the US government says they do. This ignores the fact that gold has very little intrinsic value these days. It’s not particularly rare or scarce. It has some utility in manufacturing, especially in circuit boards, but mostly, it has value because we all just agree that it has value, and that value fluctuates because of speculation and other human-caused market forces. And this new wave of supposedly making it easier to spend your gold is really just a new, unregulated currency system someone came up with. So of course it’s going to attract grifters and scammers. And once enough people have lost their life savings to it, it will fade away again for a few years unless we pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and remember that government can regulate this shit to prevent it.