The US government will buy a basket of S&P 500 stocks and use that as the backing for new money. So one dollar would be backed up by the equivalent in 1 dollar representing fractional ownership in productive companies. It would provide something tangible. And you can turn in dollars (minimum 10K in currency for 1 unit of S&P 500 ownership stock certificate)
Except that companies can still print shares. Its still just like fiat, just more of a paper trail. Gold is the only way. Because gold is hard enough to find and mine that every year, we can only pull out about 2% more every year which is about what the population of the world grows at so it works out perfect.
Curious, what would happen if in 20 years someone figures out how to turn lead into gold or silver. Using some new tech. How would that effect the economy. About stock, why would a company want to dilute themselves. They have dividends to pay out etc.. printing more shares would only hurt themselves.
They already do that. That is how the new superheavy elements are discovered, smashing together lighter elements. Except they often last for millionths of a second or so. They now create high-quality diamonds in the lab, which can be made in rare colours and very high value. They are cheaper than natural ones, and DeBeers trembles. Someday, diamonds will be cheap If gold or silver is made cheaply, then it will no longer have much value.
If gold is the only way then why did Nixon take the US off of it? Because the Germans called our bluff. We were printing dollars in excess of our gold without devaluing accordingly. Any monetary system will be abused when the organization who controls the monetary base also has the ability to borrow internally in order to fund their operation and expansion.
Nixon had himself to blame, it was his easy money Fed chairman, who advised him during his first presidential bid, who pumped money and caused much of the inflation of the late 60's and early 70's.
You have to study the history of fiat currencies to understand why a fiat currency is the only type of currency that will work. There is nothing wrong with a fiat currency -- it's the abuse that destroys it. To fix the monetary problems mankind has you have to fix mankind. That ain't gonna happen so get used to financial crisis after financial crisis. It's always been that way and it will always be that way.
But if you tie currency to assets of value (ie basket of stocks, land etc..) Then every dollar would have value backed by something.
Just by having a technology that could do that, would render the technology nearly worthless. You would spend billions trying to research how to turn lead into gold and as soon as you did, the entire world would dump their gold at the same time making the price of gold the same as the price of lead. It would be an absolutely worthless technology. But that said...i dont think it is possible to create gold or silver with technology that would be cost effective. If they could create basic elements cheaply, they would be making uranium and other rare metals