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The current financial system is the outcome of climbing DOWN the ladder of hard money over a century+ into the realm of softer money over iterations- from the gold standard, to the Interwar gold exchange standard, to the Bretton Woods gold-dollar standard, to pure fiat. It has been an inflationary descent where evolution meant eroding the link between base money assets and the claims made upon them, until there was no more sovereign convertibility. Leverage then made a downy cushion for ever more growth. It is quite a different matter entirely to try to drag a civilization back UP the ladder to hard money after descending as we have. The frictions all work in reverse direction from the incentive structures established over generations. This is why reversing the financial system back to a hard money standard will not, if history has any view, be a conscious and graceful effort. It will necessarily require the violent destruction of the status quo and the vaporization of livelihoods which are reliant upon the present system. The move TOWARD a hard money system from one of fiat paper is significantly more difficult than the move AWAY from hard money toward profligacy, largely because the former requires shared sacrifice. A Bitcoin or new gold standard would likely first require violence.