Yes, I wouldn’t call it a desirable circumstance, but half of something tangible is still something tangible. 
The fact of the matter is without some requirement of a commodity backing the currency, the sky is the limit as to how many currency units are possible for a government to print.
What does woke mean?
Commodity backing… that’s how it has been traditionally (gold, silver) but that’s a strange one. What if there were suddenly huge gold or silver finds? Then the currency value has massive swings in value just because of geological accident! I think the over-arching idea is that you want a “trick” that keeps people from printing to infinity. That’s what Bitcoin tries to do… jury still out on that one.
How many gold and silver mega findings have there been that affected the value of currency in a big way?
The only one I know of is when Spain colonized Latin America and used Indian slave labor to mine it. It caused horrific inflation in Spain. It was a one time event.
Theoretically cryptos do that, but how well has that gone? Remember Sam Fried?
Sorry, but mods clamped down on political discussion a while ago on this forum. I probably erred in using that term describing some FED economists. There are some who would like complete government control and knowledge of all earnings and purchases, and the ability to shut individuals down economically. These are the people I was referring to.
Cash transactions confer anonymity. If I buy a piece of yard maintenance equipment with cash, it is impossible for the government to track this purchase. That bothers some people who have a lust for more government control. Believe it or not, there are some economists who would like to control WHEN people spend money. This cannot be accomplished with cash in the mix. Cash also hinders government assessment of net worth.
Bitcoin is not SBF. SBF defrauded people but it could have had any investment idea or object or distraction at the center of the scheming. If a magician performs sleight-of-hand with a quarter, it doesn’t mean say anything about $0.25 coinage.
Yeah, by now, gold or silver shortage would be the rule of the day because there are no good finds. Just linking a currency to an element because it’s pretty and shiny seems like a strange habit.
Shiny and pretty is not the issue. Rarity, divisibility. and inertness is. Rhodium would work, and probably iridium. Uranium might work if it were not radioactive. Radioactive decay happens very slowly
Would be interested to know what methods you would favor in limiting the creation of new currency. Nothing except commodity backing has worked so far.
Gold and silver shortages are no problem. It is little problem if no currency can be minted. The currency would adjust by deflation. This is how it worked during the classical gold standard. With productivity increases, the prices of things are supposed to go down, not up- giving more buying power for wages.
If you divide the existing and known gold reserves.) by the planet’s net worth you get a valuation of $580,932 per ounce of gold. That’s ALL the gold we know about and much of it is needed for purposes other than monetary reserves.
IOW… there ain’t enough gold to back paper money, and… the net worth will always increase as long as humans dominate the planet.
Not sure what your mean by the “net worth will always increase.” The nominal “net worth” will always increase as long as we let politicians debase our currency. Do you want any sort of measurement stick to be constantly changing? Currency measures relative value of goods and services just like scales measure relative weight of objects. (Or mass, depending on the scale.). We certainly don’t want scales to be calibrated differently every time we want to weigh something. It would render them useless.
By the way, to my knowledge, the US currency was never 100% gold backed. It was some percent of the total amount of bank notes.
By the way, not sure what you mean when you say there is not enough gold to back the currency. Take the amount of gold in the Treasury, divide it by dollars in circulation. If each dollar works out to be .0000000001 ounce of gold at current prices, so be it.
But if you have a better idea to keep politicians from debasing the currency, let us know. The Romans even did it by clipping coinage. The dream of getting something for nothing to buy votes is just so very enticing.