Swapping our current system with a gold and silver standard, how would electronic payments and transfers work? Are there any articles out there that discuss this?
It would work the same way as it does today. Commodity-back currency says you can redeem the currency to get the commodity. It doesn’t matter if the money is dollars, some form of cash, some electronic deposit, etc…
I am referring to a true gold standard, in the sense that we aren’t issuing paper notes redeemable in gold or silver. Only the physical commodity itself.
Then we can’t transfer it electronically, and some entrepreneur (assuming a free market system) would come up with a solution to make this as easy as possible. But that’s with the restriction that the only accepted form of currency is physical (but not digital) currency.
Somebody has already come up with it:
… and don’t forget the 1996 original, e-gold
Trusted bank(s) + PayPal + electronic gold currency + public-key cryptography + perfect forward secrecy = State disintegration through untraceable agorism? More info.