Government can’t guarantee anything, so that can’t be correct. The difference is that digital gold transactions cannot be trustless.
Discussion
They can "guarantee" the IOUs, just like they did on the previous gold backed notes.
Right, but you don’t need a state to pretend to guarantee something. There could be a stateless gold standard. However, there would still have to be trusted guarantors of the physical gold.
Sure, but the masses have been conditioned to believe that the state is the ultimate authority, so it's most likely to turn out that way.
