system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does the gold standard work in a broad sense?
gpt
Imagine that your currency of choice is solid gold because gold is something that humanity as always valued highly and anyone on earth is willing to take payment in gold out of confidence that they will later be able to use it to buy whatever else they need in turn.

But solid gold is also heavy and inconvenient to lug around to make transactions with, so you, the government owning a lot of gold, store it all in one place and instead issue paper slips that each essentially state "I, <government>, promise to pay the bearer of this paper slip X amount of gold upon having it returned to me." (instead of paper slips you could also use some other recognisable token, such as small metal discs)

As long as people believe the government will keep that promise, they can happily use such a paper slip in place of the actual amount of gold it represents. The government now effectively have a paper currency, but there can only ever be as much paper in circulation as represents the amount of gold that the government actually has stored.

To "move off the gold standard" essentially means that the government stops promising to pay out gold upon being given back the paper slip. The currency essentially becomes a commodity in itself with a value determined solely by how useful people overall believe it to be for making transactions now and in the future.