John Rubino--What Is The Rise Of Goldbacked Currencies Telling Us? #2678

John writes that "Gold bugs around the world got a shock a few weeks ago when a tiny Canadian start-up called BitGold bought venerable GoldMoney, the second biggest (after BullionVault) precious metals storage firm.

Now come the questions. Is this a case of a flashy tech company using its temporarily-inflated stock to buy real assets, a kind of AOL/Time Warner deal which goes sour when the new tech turns out to be a bubble? Or are these the young visionaries who finally solve the puzzle that eluded their elders? 

First, a little digression: Back in the late 1990s while writing mostly about the excesses of the dot-com bubble, I was looking for a more optimistic theme. After interviewing GoldMoney’s James Turk for a couple of magazine articles, I fixated on his and others’ attempts to use the Internet to turn gold back into a functioning currency. This was a libertarian fantasy made real, allowing people to keep their spare cash in sound money while bypassing the increasingly dysfunctional, predatory banks with their hidden fees and stupid rules."