Are there any recent and credible economists that support a return to the gold standard?

In economics, most new schools of thought are crankish and don’t pay attention to prior work and are not grounded in the subtleties of how money works. However the Cato Institute is a serious place (disclaimer - I worked there for a while, about 23 years ago) and have run conferences on monetary policy every year for 34 years now:

annual monetary conference

Many of these thinkers will be sympathetic to gold, and I think one of the conferences post 2008 did have a restoration of the gold standard as a theme.

Note - they also have done some interesting stuff on crypto-currencies, which I haven’t yet read.

For what it’s worth I think the most likely future of money is based on work written by Tyler Cowen and his then-graduate student Randall Kroszner called New Monetary Economics and published c 93 if I remember. Randall Kroszner is at the Fed, and Tyler is now at Marginal Revolution (and George Mason University). I haven’t been able to interest Tyler much in the practical relevance right here right now of his old work, but people are funny like that.

What they wrote about in that book was based on prior work by Eugene Fama that was a bit off the wall in its first incarnation but had the seeds of something truly brilliant within. This was that it is possible to unbundle the three functions of money: store of value, unit of account, and medium of exchange.

When they wrote about it, it was something like science fiction, but science fiction has a way of anticipating the future, and conditions are ripe for the seeds to grow.

Specifically, that future looks something like you quote prices in gold ounces, you use bitcoin or its spiritual successor to make payments (medium of exchange), and you store value in whatever kind of assets you choose as your personal ‘treasury’ portfolio (for most people this might be some mix of gold-denominated bills, mutual funds, a portfolio of equities, credit and some bitcoin to reduce transaction costs).

This addresses the concern that bitcoin is too volatile since prices are quoted in something reasonably stable - I suggested gold, but it could be whatever people choose to use, which could even be US dollars today though I doubt it will be so in future; and since you store assets in whatever you find most convenient. Ie there would be automatic conversion from bitcoin received and to bitcoin sent versus liquid assets.

The missing piece there is that there is no way automatically to convert to and for between liquid assets and bitcoin, and the reason for that is regulation. Some developments with ethereum suggest that may happen via private means anyway, and in the end regulation will change too, one way and another (and if things fall apart then nobody will have the ability or will to enforce the rules).