Gold and Silver have been recognised as money and a store of value for centuries.
It was only 52 years ago, when President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, that we started living in a world of FIAT currency, which has nothing tangible backing it.
Before that, the US dollar was “honest money”, directly backed by silver and gold.
Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where online payments can be made in gold and silver.
But that’s exactly what you can now do, thanks to Kinesis Money and my Kinesis Pay plugin for aMember.
But before I show you HOW, let’s first talk about WHY you might want to do this…
Who Tells Your Story?
The original US dollar, as defined in Coinage Act of 1792 enacted by Alexander Hamilton, was a physical silver coin containing 371.25 grains (24.057 grams) of fine silver.
But silver coinage is heavy and bulky, so it became common practice for people to deposit their gold and silver coins with the banks, in exchange for a promissory note.
In other words, the “dollar bill” was an I.O.U / receipt for a deposit of gold and/or silver, which people then traded with each other in lieu of the physical coins.
That’s why the original US dollar banknotes contain the promise to “pay to the bearer on demand one dollar”. And why J.P. Morgan famously stated: “Gold is money. Everything else is credit.”
Even after World War II, when the Bretton Woods system was agreed and the US became the world’s primary reserve currency, the US dollar was pegged to Gold, and all the other world currencies were pegged to the dollar.
You could take your banknotes to the Federal Reserve and trade them for gold at $35 per ounce.
That all changed in 1971 when President Nixon broke the convertibility of the US dollar into gold.
At a stroke, the world’s currencies became backed by nothing… the promise to pay a dollar (24.057 grams of silver) was defaulted and was eventually removed from the banknotes.
And in the greatest con of all time, the fiat dollar banknote was represented as BEING a dollar, which it is argued would mean redefining the 7th Amendment!
“Paper Is Poverty”
The dangers of fiat currency were well recognized by the founding fathers of the USA.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were all staunch opponents of “paper money”. Alexander Hamilton condemned “unfunded paper” – ie backed by nothing.
Jefferson wrote in 1788:
“Paper is poverty,… it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.“
And, in 1813: “The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience for transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals… it is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.”
Prophetic words indeed.
The decoupling of the dollar from gold and silver has allowed banks and the Federal Reserve to create currency out of thin air, inflating the money supply, exporting inflation around the world and diluting the purchasing power of peoples savings.
In fact, the US has now printed over 34 TRILLION dollars of debt, and you need over $2,000 to buy an ounce of gold.
Likewise, the 24.057 grams silver in the original Silver dollar now costs around $17.60 of today’s paper dollars.
Let’s be clear here. The value of Gold and Silver has not gone ‘up’… the purchasing power of the US dollar (and by proxy all other fiat currencies) has gone DOWN.
That means the fiat dollar has lost over 95% of its original value and purchasing power.
Here’s a plot of US production worker wages from the excellent Priced In Gold website.
This shows that a person working today earns just ONE SIXTH (in gold terms) as a worker in 1971.
You don’t need to be an economic genius to see that inflation (debasement) is a DELIBERATE policy for governments, no matter how hard the may wring their hands and deflect the causes.
No wonder people are struggling with the cost of living!
In Gold We Trust
I’ve been a fan of Kinesis Money since 2021, because it allows you to store Gold and Silver as fully backed, spendable crypto-tokens that can be spent using a debit card, and redeemed at any time for physical gold and silver.
So you get the convenience of digital currency plus the inflation protection of Gold and Silver.
It’s essentially a modern return to what the US dollar used to be when each dollar bill was a valid promissory note for physical silver and gold.
It protects you from losing purchasing power to inflation, as the money printer goes brrrr. And unlike the gold reserves of the Federal Reserve, Kinesis is independently audited every quarter.
So when Kinesis announced they were launching Kinesis Pay (KPay) to allow businesses to accept payments in Gold and Silver, I knew I wanted to write a Kinesis Pay plugin for aMember.
It’s free and open-source… and even better, if you use my referral link to join Kinesis, you’ll earn 0.5KAG as a reward for using my link (once you meet the criteria).
So if you want to accept payments in honest money, and help others re-discover gold and silver too, then get the plugin here.
Cheers
Rob
Ps – If this has whetted your appetite to learn more, I highly recommend the “Hidden Secrets of Money” video series by Mike Maloney (episode 1 below).
