RE: A Gold Standard for and by the Masses.
Gold is a great storage of value, but is a terrible currency. The reason: there just isn't enough of it in existence to allow everyone on earth to have even just a tiny amount. As long as the gold backed crypto doesn't get adopted in mass it will work. If we assume that the gold is stored in vaults and the Kinesis Velocity Token (KVT) is adopted in mass, the currency will fall apart because there isn't enough of it to go around. This would in turn drive price through the roof. The lasting effect is that we can no longer use gold in our consumer products due to scarcity and we will suffer a technological setback.
The storage of real gold in vaults will inevitably not match the circulating supply of the backed currency as there is no way around it if adoption goes widespread. The options are to allow the currency to fail to function as a currency and cause gold to be unobtainable, or just lie about the amount of gold that exists in the vaults. It would be soooo much more valuable to just lie about the supply of gold.
The price of precious metals are already being manipulated by banks. This gold backed crypto would only make it easier to manipulate price.
Do yourself a favor and simply calculate the total amount of gold ever mined and multiply it by the price. You will find out there is only enough gold to put approximately $1.00 in every person's pocket in the planet. As long a cryptocurrency adoption remained small like it is today, the gold backed currency would work, but it would soon break if mass adoption were to take place.
$1/person? You think mined gold is valued at just $7B? Daily gold trade is over $32B.
Kinesis does not mint the tokens nor are the tokens backed by gold exclusively held by Kinesis vaults.
People mint it. Any trusted vault may store it. It's an open network so the amount of gold being stored cannot be falsified.
As for gold needed to support this, I raised that question too when I met the team.
Present net gold supply is valued at $7T. To support this network, were the whole world to adopt it, price would appreciate.
Industries won't be affected as gold is sparingly used in manufacturing. The few products that do use it would apply close substitutes or use the newly priced gold. However, as gold would be only one component, final price won't be affected much.