I imagine most of us have at least a passing acquaintance with money, if meager amounts of it. We probably figured out long ago that a hundred dollar bill doesn't contain materials worth a hundred dollars. And while plenty of us might imagine that there's some relationship between the value of metals in a coin and the value of that coin (there isn't really), given wildly fluctuating commodity prices it would be rather difficult to make this relationship stable.
And, no, you don't need a trillion dollars worth of platinum to mint a trillion dollar platinum coin.
