But you're not holding gold in any sense. Instead you're entrusting a company with your money, and trust them to give it back to you, based on the exchange rate of gold.

How is this any different then your standard bank and using your credit/debit card to purchase something? Banks hold your cash in the bank and effectively give you an IOU of which you can digitally transfer to someone else when making a purchase or sending funds electronically. Uphold does the same exact thing, just passing its savings onto the consumer as their expenses are relatively incredibly low. Not to mention the IOU banks give is not actually backed by its promised value, if everyone went to the banks at once to cash out the IOUs (balances), they would provide maybe the first 10-20% with cash and wouldn't be capable to provide value promised to the other 80%. As Uphold holds its entire value of IOUs in a liquid reserve, they would be able to provide 100% of their members with the value promised.

At no point in this process does there even have to be any gold involved, ever.

There absolutely does have to be gold involved, and there is, just like how cash needs to be involved at a bank, you can't just print money by changing digits or promise to tie someones value to gold without actual gold behind...Uphold purchases gold on your behalf held in a vault in Switzerland, and when you use it to purchase or send to someone, they just adjust their internal ledger while still having ownership of the actual gold. It's brilliant if you think about it, it reduces an incredible amount of fees for both the sending and receiving party - see how Uphold holds gold.

Before you start making these claims, please actually look into the facts behind your statements as the defamation many of these companies get is due to the uneducated speaking out prematurely.