That was the official reason given, but it's no coincidence that it happened shortly after France and other countries started redeeming their gold in large numbers. The US was forced to abandon it.

Blockchains are just highly replicated databases which allow each participant to audit accounts independently. How is that not a better foundation for a monetary system which is currently made up of thousands of distinct databases which have no reliable consensus about any of the numbers recorded within and where almost nobody can see what is inside any of those systems, let alone audit them.

It's kind of ridiculous to think that today, big banks have the power to just create units inside each others' systems and nobody would know aside from a tiny number of individuals who have a huge incentive to pretend that it's not happening... And given the massive complexity of how these systems interact with each other, they'd have plausible deniability too!

I once worked for a bank where all the financial data was encrypted (from regular employees at least)... Even if the records were being tampered with via some flawed mechanism, it's possible that nobody in the company would realize it.