PS - apologies for hijacking the OP's thread too!
PPS - It is always easier to ask for forgiveness, rather than risk the refusal of permission. Saves a lot of time, too, unless it is abused.
I did mention "precious" commodity instead of specifically naming silver. Several things qualify as "precious" (besides the Ring of Power) and I think silver is considered a precious metal by many people, although it is quite common compared to gold. Platinum and iridium could also be considered as precious. What is considered to be "precious" all depends on a willing buyer paying the asking cost of a seller.
'Goldbacks' ... issued in Utah and Nevada and New Hampshire ... are accepted currency in many places there.
That is no doubt true, but that does not mean this "currency" is "legal tender for all debts public and private." In fact, it is NOT legal tender anywhere, not even in the state that issued the Goldback. It is
art that appears in the likeness of currency. The 50 Goldback contains 1/20 Troy ounces of pure gold, evaporated or otherwise deposited on plastic film. The selling price is currently 186.50 dollars. 2026.45 dollars per Troy ounce is the current asking price for gold. That 50 Goldback is potentially worth about a hundred bux if you melt it down, separate the gold from the plastic, and sell the gold. That's not a very good deal unless the price of gold increases substantially, as it no doubt will do (eventually) if the inflation of dollar currency continues its current trend upward. Eventually, no one will be able to afford to purchase an ounce of gold, nor even a loaf of bread, if the value of a dollar is worth less than the paper it is printed on. Goldbacks are NOT a solution to inflation, nor are Goldbacks legitimate currency. If you "invest," say, a million dollars to purchase Goldbacks, there is no reason to believe the value of gold, in the same currency used to purchase Goldbacks, will ever increase sufficiently to preserve your "investment."
OTOH, an ounce of pure gold is still an ounce of gold, no matter how much fiat currency is required to purchase that gold. Gold in America was often found "in the wild" in the form of fine particles (gold dust) as well as in the form of larger nuggets. It still found that way today. The gold dust or nuggets could be stored and carried on a person safely, without loss, in leather pouches. Later, the gold could be weighed out to purchase items at an agreed on "cost" of a certain weight of gold for the purchase of the item. Although these transactions were completely transparent, the actual process of weighing out the gold to complete the purchase was inconvenient. Also, some of the gold dust could be lost to spillage onto the floor, where it would later be recovered by the shop keeper sweeping the floor. Later, gold coins became a more convenient means of trade, but that had problems with people shaving the edges of coins to recover some gold and people counterfeiting coins by alloying gold with metals of lesser value.
Unfortunately, there is simply not enough gold in the world to support its use as money. Pure gold is a scarce but very useful commodity, so it retains its value better than most commodities. Gold can also be alloyed with other metals, silver for example, to increase the "wearability" of coinage and jewellery. Fortunately, there are chemical methods of recovering pure gold from its alloys.
After Germany lost World War I, the cost of reparations led the Weimar Republic to issue massive amounts of fiat currency. So much "money" was printed and distributed into the economy that
hyper-inflation of the Deutschmark occurred. It reached its peak in November 1923, when ONE American dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks!
Americans like to believe that modern financial institutions can prevent another extreme inflationary event, but that simply isn't true. Inflation is, by definition, the result of too much money trying to purchase a diminishing supply of goods. In my opinion it is caused by two things: (1) Policies that allow for the creation of unlimited amounts of fiat currency; and (2) Democracy, where the majority will inevitably vote for "bread and circuses" with no consideration for how to pay for it. We see the truth of this most vividly in the so-called left-coast "blue" states of California, Oregon, and Washington, but the idea that everything should be "free" has creeped across the entire country as government "entitlement" programs have become a huge part of the national spending budget, second only to the interest owed on the national debt.
I am NOT complaining: being retired, I depend on the entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare for a goodly part of my retirement debts and obligations. I have already received more from those programs than I contributed in taxes to fund them, all because my generous government prints money to pay for them.