system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Since the value of gold fluctuates based on how valuable people decide it is to them that day, can't we then say that a gold-backed currency would be just as much a "fiat" one as ones like the current USD?

My question is motivated by an attempt recently to explicitly define for myself, in my own mind, what the term "fiat" really means in this context.  Of course one could specify that by fiat they mean only \*government\* fiat, but that isn't a satisfying distinction to me since whether it's a group of govt officials saying "this is what we say it's worth today" or whether it's a group of gold investors saying it, it still seems to me to be the same fundamentally arbitrary process.
gpt
in the same sense you can basically say that the current system is a gold standard but instead of gold you have the goods that go into cpi every year.

it is just how convoluted you want to make it. everything has its value "because people decide it"