Having a piece of paper that says you owe me 6 trillion kJ is fine until it turns out you can't pay up. Ultimately, someone has to have the actual backing comm

Having a piece of paper that says you owe me 6 trillion kJ is fine until it turns out you can't pay up. Ultimately, someone has to have the actual backing commodity. This is no problem with USD, since it's all just numbers anyway. It's less of a problem for gold than for energy, since 1 400oz bar is worth over half a million USD. Half a million USD in barrels of oil is more than 5000 barrels. Ideally you'd want something that was easy to store to base your economy on. :)