Are you saying that you wouldn't have to move the physical gold around, you just use Lightning to do the accounting?
I was thinking of Lightning network to enable small BTC transfers as being like the ancient money order networks to enable small gold transfers (when travel was much slower and riskier).
Then it hit me - Lightning, or something like it could work for gold as well as BitCoin. "Own physical gold" many say. Cool. But how do you spend it when SHTF? So transferring some gold to another Lightning node is harder and more expensive than transferring BTC. But the principle is the same. Sorry about the empty note. Coracle wouldn't let me type the rest of the note after tagging people. So I'll try tagging at the end.
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Discussion
Right. You would do occasional transfers to even up excessive risk, but mostly Lightning-like network would do the accounting. Just like in ancient times.
One difference, is that ancient money orders had only direct channels. It was just too cumbersome to navigate multiple hops. But the Lightning network navigates multiple hops with ease, and all the bookkeeping is automated.