And yet, it does. Amazing.

Considering that real wages have been stagnant for 20 years and the system's beginning to fray everywhere isn't exactly a qualified success. Keynesian policy and a debt based monetary system is not supposed to not let this kind of thing happen. We're not supposed to have repeated boom&bust cycles like the ones we've seen in 2001 and 2008 and probably shortly again. Youth unemployment is rampant around the globe, and social unrest from economic hardship is popping up everywhere.

Because the gold standard was such a rousing success, every country on Earth continues to use it to this day. TIL gold standard economies didn't need a military, banks, or a government.

I didn't say the gold standard was a rousing success (of course it could only be an abject failure). I said gold was sound money. This is a fact that's been widely recognized whenever shit hit the fan in the last couple thousand years. And whenever people went and meddled with it, shit eventually hit the fan again (as when they dilluted gold coins and propped up the value of their currency with their military, like say the roman empire).

Why? This is entirely conclusory. Just because you say something doesn't make it true.

Name me any other monetary instrument that does not have counterparty risk, and which you can send trough an internet connection. Proof of stake ones aren't, that's been proven in abundance. Ripple isn't, because the entirety of ripple is based on massive counterparty risk (in every respect, IOUs, premined ripples, central control, gateways, etc.)

To give you a little historic perspective. Suppose you're a roman merchantman and you need to trade with somebody in Asia. Of course you can take a purse full of diluted roman coins that contain like 5% gold (or worse) and hope anybody over there, where your empire has zero reach will accept them. But the reality was, they didn't. Nobody in Asia wanted to get paid for valuable commodities with worthless chunks of metal. So what you did take over there to trade as a currency was gold. Why? Because irrespective of who ruled what where and who held what IOUs to whom, gold was always a scarce commodity and widely accepted as a form of payment. And what happened when the roman empire got out of business? Their currency was patently worthless once their empire collapsed. Their coins where ugly little corroded chunks of copper. So what did people do in the intervening years while there wasn't an empire to prop up a currency and your little fiefdom needed to trade both within and with your neighbors? You used gold, because no matter what stamp was on that gold coin, it was accepted currency.

You can paint the exact same story pretty much anytime there was a collapse and some form of worthless token was used as currency. Sometimes you can paint it even without any collapse, because everybody realized it was just worthless tokens. But whatever the cause, the outcome has been invariably, without fail, been that people reverted to sound money again. You can trace that straight back for thousands of years, trough every empire empire and kingdom that ever existed. Meddling with sound money is the favorite pastime of every king, emperor, dictator and politician. Reverting to sound money is what people do to make things work again when shit hits the fan (which it always does).