Had occasion to look into this great article today: "The Gold Pool (1961–1968) and the Fall of the Bretton Woods System: Lessons for Central Bank Cooperation" (2019, Journal of Economic History).
Dealing with the Gold Pool (which I've touched upon in MONEY CLASSes -- #764988), there's a segment in the article describing how gold was traded between nation's central banks.
Pretty wild to think that the base settlement media of the entire monetary system shifted ownership by merely re-assigning the label of the gold bars in the Bank of England's vaults. Ownership without custody is some special sort of madness, really.
People sometimes ridicule the rai stones from the island of Yap and how this peculiar "money" changed hands by social convention, the monetary stones rarely even moving location.
...and then the base layer of the Western world's entire monetary system, as late as the 1960s, operated in precisely that way. Cray-cray.
Wiiiiild, too, that the cool term for this was "loco"... because that sort of describes the entire patchwork-fake-gold standard.
Could you imagine running an entire bitcoin standard on, like, the FTX ledger(?!) with the bitcoin never actually moving but some Sam Bankman-Fried character re-assigning the nominal ownership every time some banking institutions settle up??
Peace,
/J