If you could get someone to accept a silver coin to buy $5 of groceries, how would they give you your change? Cut a silver coin into fractions? Weigh you out some scrap silver? Not likely. Gold and silver are assets/commodities, not really money. They're the best assets out there perhaps, but not money, not in a 21st century sense of the word.
You do realize the US operated on gold & silver coins for over a century. Later redeemable paper notes were used.
Yes, I do. Bear in mind that back then, all commodity prices were vastly different, as was the size of the population consuming them. The culture surrounding money was also pretty different (such that the fiat "revolution" had some pretty significant refuseniks, that knew full well how appallingly it could be exploited)
Silver is "only" ~$30 per ounce. Coins can be relatively easily be made down to 0.1 ounces which would be ~$3 in purcashing power. If you need smaller denominations copper is great. At ~$0.30 per ounce it is good for sub $1 "change".
Yes, and copper may well be the next precious metal to have it's market price heavily leant on (against a backdrop of an even higher rate of fiat printing). Not saying that in itself makes precious metals any less good money though, it's commodity price distortion and money printing that are the problem, not anything inherent to metals.
Of course digital gold/silver is certainly possible. Trust is a concern which is why bitcoin will increasingly make inroads into the PM community.
The number one thing you can trust with bitcoin is the size of the supply. It's not possible to hide Bitcoin supply from the world for centuries, or to discover new Bitcoin deposits in an untapped geological strata, or to dump thousands of extra tons into the supply once James Cameron and Jeff Bezos mine an asteroid. Not to say that all these things are massively likely, but with Bitcoin, they are literally impossible.
