Maintaining a gold standard requires a commitment from participating
countries to be willing to buy and sell gold to anyone at the fixed price.
To maintain a price of $20.67 per ounce, the United States had to buy
and sell gold at that price. Gold was used as the monetary standard
because it is a homogeneous commodity (could you have a fish standard?)
worldwide that is easily storable, portable, and divisible into standardized
units like ounces. Since gold is costly to produce, it possesses another