When the Goldback was new in 2019 the reception was very mixed. While some people saw the vision and hopped on the train immediately, there were quite a few people in the precious metals community that were skeptical. In the first months I’d find myself deep within websites like reddit arguing with total strangers about whether or not Goldbacks should have a place and where that might be, and why.
There is one particular debate I remember having that comes to mind today, and that was with a Silverbug that was trying to make the case that Goldbacks don’t have much transactional value because of the existence of silver. “There are already silver mercury dimes that can do even tiny transactions that the Goldback would be good for”, he argued. I pointed out to this gentleman that if you talk to a silver bug long enough that they will tell you that silver has been suppressed and manipulated for decades and that the house of cards keeping the price down will eventually fail and that silver could go to the moon! To the moon! This is what I was telling my friends backs in 2012 when I was buying at $30 an ounce by the way. Silver has always been a little bit speculative compared to gold it seems.
If silver really does go to $200 or $2,000 an ounce then it is going to be too valuable for small transactions, just like gold. Unless… you can split it into a thousand pieces in an inexpensive way. We don’t know if today is the beginning of the end for cheap silver or not but it certainly has people thinking. Personally when I feel like it is time to cash out my silver I won’t be getting ‘cash’ because if I do that then I would be getting a deflationary currency. Instead I’ll buy a bunch of Goldbacks because I know that I can use those. They are just less speculative than silver.