The real deep myth at the heart of criticism of the gold standard is that it’s value stems from its use as a commodity. The fact is that gold is valuable because its scarcity is founded in the scarcity of time (the time to extract it, which has hardly changed in centuries).

Commodity prices change; time is changeless and irreversible. That is the source of gold’s immemorial power as the monetary element, and it will be the source of the value of the digital forms of gold that are emerging around the globe. The present system — the global ocean of currency trading — has no secure reference of any kind. Thus it is a sea of speculation rather than a metric for value. The world economy is currently drowning in it.

George Gilder is a bestselling writer and author of, most recently, The 21st Century Case for Gold: A New Information Theory of Money.