Gold is an interesting case because it solves some problems…

Gold is an interesting case because it solves some problems brilliantly and fails at others.
What is right with gold? It is costly to produce. Nobody can create it by decree. It exists independently of politics. It imposes discipline because the supply cannot be expanded at the whim of a treasury or central bank. In that sense, it acts as a constraint on power. A promise redeemable in gold is ultimately tied to something scarce and objectively costly to obtain.
What is wrong with gold? The problem is not scarcity. The problem is verification and movement.
If someone offers me a gold bar, how do I know it is genuine? I need an assay. I need to trust a refiner, a mint, a dealer, or an expert. Every step introduces cost. Every step introduces trust.
The problem becomes worse internationally. Thai gold is a useful example. Thai gold is often traded at 96.5% purity rather than the standards common in many other markets. It functions perfectly well inside its own ecosystem, but once it crosses borders, questions arise. It may need to be re-assayed. It may be discounted. Additional costs appear simply because different systems use different standards.
Gold therefore suffers from a problem that information does not. Every transfer of significant value carries physical friction.
Buying a large quantity of gold is relatively straightforward. Buying a tiny fraction for daily commerce is much harder. Historically, societies solved this by issuing certificates, notes, warehouse receipts, and bank obligations. But the moment that happens, one is no longer transferring gold. One is transferring a claim on gold.
And then the question becomes: who issued the claim?
The certificate may be perfectly valid. The vault may be honest. The custodian may be reputable. But trust has re-entered the system.
Physical gold also has another weakness. It is visible.
A government can seize it. A border agent can confiscate it. A customs authority can detain it. A criminal can steal it. Moving substantial value across the world requires physical movement, security, insurance, and legal compliance.
Fiat money solved many of these transport problems. It made movement easy. It made settlement fast. But it did so by abandoning scarcity. Once money becomes merely an entry in a ledger controlled by political institutions, the temptation to create more of it becomes overwhelming. History demonstrates repeatedly that expanding the money supply does not eliminate economic reality. It merely redistributes costs through time.
Neither gold nor fiat fully solves the problem.
Gold provides scarcity but struggles with verification, divisibility, and transport.
Fiat provides transport, divisibility, and convenience but struggles with discipline and long-term integrity.
The ideal system would combine the strengths of both. It would preserve scarcity without requiring physical movement. It would allow direct ownership without dependence on custodians. It would permit verification without requiring assay. It would allow the transfer of value across borders without trucks, vaults, guards, or government checkpoints.
That is the real lesson. The question was never whether gold was valuable. The question was how to preserve the properties that make gold valuable while removing the friction that makes gold impractical. Gold identified the problem. Technology offers a way to solve it.
Written by S. Tominaga