I am in the opinion that we should experiment with models other than a bunch of academics with no real practical experience getting together every month and deciding on the fate of the world economy. I am sure we could come up with something better.
"Islamic banking and finance — the industry built around avoiding interest and other financial practices found in violation of sharia (Islamic law) — has been both praised and criticized by observers.
The industry has been praised for turning a "theory" into an industry that has grown to about $2 trillion in size; for attracting banking users whose religious objections have kept them away from conventional banking services, drawing non-Muslim bankers into the field, and (according to other supporters) introducing a more stable, less risky form of finance.
However, the industry has also been criticized for ignoring its "basic philosophy" and moved in the wrong direction over the decades — leading both outsiders and rank and file Muslims to question it. This has happened first by the sidelining the original finance method advocated by promoters — risk-sharing finance — in favor of fixed-markup finance of purchases (particularly murabaha), and then by distorting the rules of that fixed-markup murabaha, effectively delivering conventional cash interest loans following conventional interest rates, but disguised with "ruses and subterfuges" and burdened with "higher costs, bigger risks".
Other issues/complaints raised include a lack of effort by the industry to help small traders and the poor; the question of how to deal with inflation, late payments, the lack of hedging of currencies and rates or sharia-compliant places to park short term funds for liquidity; the non-Muslim ownership of much of Islamic banking, and the concentration of what ownership is in Muslim hands."
Wants a centralized version of Ethereum when checks and balances? Israel is building that.
You can even build an Islamic monetary structure enforced by smart contracts (addressing sibling comment: historically Islamic financial systems collapsed because they are enforced by corruptible people).
Like all things, most experiments would fail (and most people shouldn't put their savings in experiments!). We might end up with even a worse monetary system (unlikely imho, because I believe the markets are free to accept and reject those experiments). I won't fight it though - the markets are brutal, and in time, kills bad ideas. I do want the experimentations to happen though!
There's the gold standard. There are an estimated 250,000 tons of gold in the world, with estimated reserves of 60,000 tons. (https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world) Unfortunately, quite a lot of that is tied up in things like jewelry which is fixable, I suppose. And world gold production (https://www.statista.com/statistics/238414/global-gold-produ...) has roughly matched gross world product growth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product#Recent_gro...) over the last few years. On the other hand, when gold production starts going to zero while economic activity continues to grow, you get deflation and financial collapse, so, yeah.
There's a silver standard and multi-metallic standards, and I'm really hoping there's a hilarious story behind this sentence from wikipedia: "Great Britain accidentally adopted a de facto gold standard in 1717 when Sir Isaac Newton, then-master of the Royal Mint, set the exchange rate of silver to gold too low, thus causing silver coins to go out of circulation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard) (Apparently, the US's introduction to the gold standard was also accidental, caused by the 1849 California gold rush.) Unfortunately, those systems didn't prevent a crash about every decade. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis#19th_century)
Or you could let things float, like exactly nobody else does. I'm sure that won't be rife with corruption, bank failures, and its own boom and bust cycles.
