Excellent post. Excellent description of how fiat was been slowly inoculated into the monetary system.

IMO the key problem of metallic gold was scalability, as you conclude, rather than difficult to validate (gold’s density makes it very easy to assay, even easier than a bank note).

I would add that any type of backed currency, which includes current fiat currencies, have a huge hidden cost because in order to enforce the backing (whether it is gold, mortgages, loans or bonds) a complex and sound legal infrastructure is needed.

That is, a fiat currency or even a gold redeemable bank note (future goods used as currency) are obviously worthless without a legal infrastructure, opposed to metallic gold or Bitcoin (present goods used as currency) which don’t need that legal infrastructure in order to have value. Therefore, credit currencies have a very important cost that Money (a currency that is not anyone else’s liability, like Bitcoin) does not have.