“Locking gold away in vaults is in just this way a destruction of a resource. Complicated rules of bookkeeping (not of physics) make it nearly impossible to get at it again. So gold grows scarce, and yet there are sensible uses for gold, the seventy-ninth element. Those bookkeeping customs intimidate us like natural laws. Yet we have only to change them (‘Forget the gold standard’).”
—Buckminster Fuller (Reworded)