The Royal Mint (the body permitted to strike British coins) have a venture with the US based CME to allow electronic trading of gold.
From the Reuters article:
The Royal Mint will put gold bars into its on-site secure vault, which will then be digitised to create RMGs [Royal Mint Gold] whose ownership will be recorded on the blockchain. Traders will then be able to trade in and out of RMGs between themselves.
Blockchain - or distributed ledger - technology keeps track of and authenticates a continuously growing list of transaction data, which is secured by a global network of computers and is virtually impossible to be tampered with or revised.
The gold would still physically reside with the Mint but could be converted to a physical delivery later. This is fairly standard practice. The Bank Of England used to just wheel a pallet from one side of a vault to another when it changed ownership. The idea seems to be to lower the cost of trading gold which has traditional involved a lot of middle layers who add margins and push up the price.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:28AM
Way back, in almost pre-history, people got stuff to flaunt their wealth with. Fat kids, baubles, jewelry, etc. As time went by, we kept the fat kids and the baubles, the jewelry got flashier. Real gold and silver jewelry - and then COINS! People could trade bits of gold for whatever they wanted.
Today, we've evolved beyond all of that. Now, we have fat kids, baubles, gaudy jewelry, and signed bits that say we know where some rich bastards keep their gold. I mean - you can't actually walk into the vualt, and touch your gold. Just some signed bits that reside on a computer network, that say there is some gold stashed away somehwere.
Is this evolution, or what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:52AM
Still better than some signed bit of paper backed up by the "good faith and credit" of the worlds most dangerous and aggressive country.
Seriously, accepting a dollar bill is like getting an IOU from the school yard bully.
It's backed up by the fact you know he's going to kick some kid's ass to get it paid back.
The kid on the receiving end of the beat down might be you though.
Glad to know that blockchain technology has finally given the pallet driver in the mint a chance to retire. I bet he's hundreds of years old by now.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @03:38AM
Not a very revolutionary evolution step, the only difference from the precedent: [wikipedia.org] it's on a computer network.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @11:02AM
So much for that software patent I was hoping to file, method for using carved stones as currency on a computer.