>M-m-muh gold! Fiat is valueless, only GOLD is the true currency
Can someone explain to me what makes gold money? I will never understand the huge boner lolbertarians have for it, its value is arbitrarily defined just like all other commodities. There's no difference between gold and, say, bitcoin.
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You can't print gold
Well that took all of two seconds
One exists while the other does not
Its incredibly finite
thats not to say the value of gold cant rise or fall, but rare metals are absurdly static
gold in specific is used because it was the traditional currency aince the coin was first created, chosen then for its luster and the fact that it would never decay
Small, limited supply
Unreactive, lasts fucking ages, doesn't rust
Malleable, easy to shape
>tfw your dick is could be used to back currency
HAHAHAAAHA
/thread
My god OP you couldn't have just googled that?
>Can someone explain to me what makes gold money?
Our economy started on bartering. You produce corn but you want to buy chickens, so you trade your corn for chickens. Now, if you want tools for your farm, but the blacksmith doesn't want your corn, how can you get the tools when you have nothing to trade that the blacksmith wants? This is where currency comes in.
Society has determined that metals such as gold and silver have value and can be used in exchange for goods and services. It is easier to carry and exchange metal coins than it is to carry around, for example, cows.
Coins are just an easier and widely excepted method to barter.
You can't print lots' of things, that doesn't mean they have value.
In an SHTF situation where society collapses you think people are going to want fucking shiny metal over food, bullets, shelter, water filters, etc.???
To steal it, you have to physically move it. Imagine trying to steal 30 billion dollars worth of gold, vs 30 billion dollars worth of bitcoins.
Now imagine the worth of a nationstate like the US. We not only have trillions of dollars worth of gold, but we have been using the petrodollar to convert paper into the next currency, oil. Thats the real reason for the stockpiles of hundreds of millions of barrels in the US of crude oil is really for, it will literally be black gold one day. It will either be rare because it takes a planet in a habitable zone creating life, or it may even be some sort of super fuel that we don't have the tech to properly utilize its potential.
it's rare, it doesn't tarnish, it's easy to recognize, it's shiny
ok, that is /thread
No, that's why you need alcohol to trade in a SHTF situation.
>Our economy started on bartering.
what do you mean "started"? all trade is barter, I want wood, you want fish. value for value, fair exchange
only now we are all forced into fraud by having to exchange value(goods) for worthless paper, or vice versa
If the United States government used gold as their currency, they would be limited in their spending on things such as wars and social benefits. Gold or anything tangible that holds value, keeps the government in check because once they run out of the currency, they cannot spend anymore. They have to procure more gold to fund their expenditures. They would have to raise taxes and take it from their citizens or pay people to mine it.
So because gold limited the government on spending, they created the fiat dollar. This gives them the ability to borrow it from the fed anytime they want to and get their war or special interest project.
This is where our national debt comes in. How many fake dollars we "borrow" from the federal reserve.
>super fuel
There's nothing particularly special about hydrocarbons besides their combustabilty
why did the royal family of england sell opium to china in exchange for gold and silver?
Gold has had value for thousands of years. No fiat currency has lasted anywhere close to that long.
It is a rare, impossible to print, difficult to fake, fungible, malleable, metal that people desire because it is shiny.
It will have value as long rich people want rare, shiny things to distinguish themselves from the poor.
Gold has a finite supply. the fed can't print a trillion dollars in new gold whenever they feel like it.
thus, it's price is tied to actual market changes and natural movements, rather then manipulations like fiat currency.
Bitcoin has the finite supply part down, technically, but security is an issue. a purely digital currency is far easier to steal in giant amounts then large quantities of a metal that is heavier then iron
The "Paper" is a representation of all goods and services in the economic basket. It has value for the same reason Gold has value.
We value it.
This is not really that hard to figure out. Yes, its "just paper", bu you get that paper for working, you can use it to buy food, and the person you give the paper too for that food can turn around and use it to pay his rent.
In that respect its much more efficient then Gold, since Gold has use for things other then a simple means of exchange.
>911
>there was a murder
its a rare metal that doesn't oxidize and can be held on to (in theory) indefinitely without it losing value
Or until we start mining asteroids and no basic element will be rare, only hard to produce molecules made under certain rare conditions.
it's more efficient for the government to counterfeit and produce
And it's fungible.
>In an SHTF situation where society collapses you think people are going to want fucking shiny metal over food, bullets, shelter, water filters, etc.???
exactly this, ammunition will be a currency
Gold is used in electronics, although I don't know how vital it is.
Yes, but if the Government debased the currency its value decreases. Each piece of currency is a single representative unit of the value of the Economy. Its value not in currency, but in its goods, services and capital.
The more money you print, the smaller a representation of the total basket it becomes since the amount of goods, services and capital does not change just because you printed more money.
yeah, and that is why we have inflation.
As far as I know it's only major use is plating on connections to prevent oxidation
you idiots are dumber than a basket of bricks.
government can't print more of it at an unlimited rate. There's a tight control of the amount of money in circulation as a result. If all money is in fact gold backed, you can't get hyper inflation, you can barely have inflation at all actually.
murdercube.com
Read this lad
Absolute required imo
It's not money, it's a commodity.
it's a good conductor of electricity
>The "Paper" is a representation of all goods and services in the economic basket
to some people, so called experts e.g., but for others, it's just paper
>its much more efficient then Gold
because the government can constantly devalue it at will? how is that positive?
>can be held on to (in theory) indefinitely without it losing value
true, a gold dollar will buy a nice suit today, just like it did in 1920, but paper dollars have lost 85% of their value since leaving the gold standard. it's fraud
so are mushrooms, luigi. un quattro formaggio al fungi por favor, avec dos cervazers
So if the Petrodollar is dying, what will replace it?
It's a reliable store of value. Of course if we were to collectively decide that gold is worthless it would become so, but that's very unlikely to happen. There has never been a point in history where gold didn't have value. So you can be fairly certain that the gold coins you own today will still have value 500 years from now. Can you say the same about any currency not minted from valuable metals?
When you only think short-term it's harder to see the significance of gold. The US dollar has been a major currency for only a couple of centuries. And just like an IOU from a bank from the 1600s is likely just a worthless piece of paper today, a day will come when US dollars will be just pretty pieces of paper.
It's a shit conductor compared to copper or even silver
>true, a gold dollar will buy a nice suit today, just like it did in 1920
Only that manufacturing a suit has become 1000 times easier since then.
Fucking kek
Rare metal asteroid mining
Excellent
Watch this and his entire series. If you want a hard redpill this is it.
youtube.com
Indeed. Deliberately so. If Governments want, they could have 0 inflation, or even Deflation. All of these things are doable. Low level inflation is a deliberate idea that was created to prevent hoarding. Its in fact essential for the economy to function as it creates room for economic growth.
Think of low level inflation less as a balloon that will eventually pop, and more of a railroad being built in front of an advancing train. Yes, the tracked be laid down before the train get's there are not being used and as such are wasteful, but eventually the train will go over them and keep on moving. If you wait for the train to reach you before laying down more tracks, then it won't move very fast. And if you don't lay down tracks at all it will derail.
Remember, the currency is a single unit of the economic basket. As that basket expands, so too much the amount of currency. If the amount of currency does not expand, each individual unit will grow more valuable as they represent individually a larger and larger share of the basket. That is what Deflation is, and its bad because it incentives people to keep money in bank accounts rather then buy stuff. This is to "bad things happening", like credit crunches, laid of employees, and so on.
Gold is not an unit of account. The price is completely arbitrary.
Is that even a thing right now? I mean immediately, since the petrobux is directly related to Saudi arabia, no?
note: gold is really really valuable in technology.
if riches decided to devalue gold and sell it all, technology would still value it and prevent it its value from crumbling.
same for jewelry.
I'm having an asphyxiation accident because of this post
10/10
Except eventually the train will stop. Unlimited growth is not possible. Unlimited population growth is not possible. The system is based on an unsustainable premise.
As soon as a single company starts doing it and makes a shitload of money from platinum there will be a industrial space race.
Probably won't happen for a few decades though.
Name one technology where gold is not expendable.
>Unlimited growth is not possible. Unlimited population growth is not possible. The system is based on an unsustainable premise.
And that's exactly why the economy is a meme
Growth does not necessarily need resources, especially in the service industry.
Olympic 1st place medals
>gimme gold for this money
>k
>gimme gold for this money
>no. you pay interest for it instead
No, the train is actually moving in a circle. People die, buildings fall down, food gets rotten and turns to dirt, and it all has get redone.
The old tracks will no longer be there when it comes time to lay new tracks. But we will create a pleasant fiction that we are still going places
>There's no difference between gold and, say, bitcoin.
Exactly, but there is a difference between those currencies and fiat currency.
it doesn't matter if you can replace it with other components.
For certain components gold does the job very cost-effectively, when factoring in product lifetime.It means that if you use aluminum or copper you would have to substitute the component so often that its overall cost would increase.
it is used HEAVILY in militar-grade electronic and moving contacts of any professional device because it guarantees that shit will fucking work after years even in hostile chemical conditions.
microprocessors use modest quantities of gold too
Gold and bitcoin to a higher degree has only fiat value as well. There is literally nothing backing this stuff except people believing it's somehow valuable.
that's a fair comment, although we're talking about a custom tailored suit here, which I believe are still done the traditional way
a gold dollar is like $1800 or so? mass produced suits can be had for $150-200?
absolutely fucking savage.
The key difference is that you can't print more bitcoins or gold. You can technically get more gold if you mine it. Bitcoins have a fixed value though, there will never be more than 20 million or whatever the number is. That alone makes it better than fiat currency.
>was created to prevent hoarding. Its in fact essential for the economy to function as it creates room for economic growth.
t. expert that knows nothing
HURRR IT'S GOOD TO STEAL VALUE FROM SAVERS AND GIVE IT TO BORROWERS, BCOS MYT JEWISH TEACHERS TOLD ME SO
Gold can currently be manufactured in a nuclear reactor by irradiation either of platinum or mercury. Only the mercury isotope 196Hg, which occurs with a frequency of 0.15% in natural mercury, can be converted to gold by slow neutron capture, and following electron capture, decay into gold's only stable isotope, 197Au.
this thread is dumber than a box of rocks.
bitcoin is bad for hoarding. it gives incentive to reset the block chain, which hasn't been done to the primary bitcoin blockchain, yet.
Not a lot of elements have the same properties as gold
That's what makes it valuable even if people didn't think it was valuable as jewelry
In practice this is a huge disadvantage because your economy can never advance faster than the mining sector.
Okay OP. First of all money is not necessarily inherently valuable. "Money" technically speaking is a promissory. In fact bank notes are promissory notes. Historically people could show up at a bank and redeem gold or silver coins of equivalent value for these bank notes.
However, in the modern age this is literally not doable. There are 2 main reasons I can think of in my head of why we should NOT be on the gold standard. One. there is not enough gold to equate the wealth of millions of people. In fact gold has only been recently used. In the past like in Baghdad people exchanged "promissory" notes in exchange for grain not gold.
But yeah there simply isn't enough gold.
So governments and financial institutions would be capped on the basis of the amount of gold or silver there are in the world and that doesn't really make sense when you are talking about things like bonds.
And most importantly, the reason why gold is so fucking stupid is because they cannot be exchanged rapidly.
Imagine if every country in the world had their money backed by gold. Things like Amazon or internet banking would not even exist. There is no way you could buy something and be able to make an instantaneous.
We are even getting to the point where bank notes are also getting in the way of instantaneous transaction. For example if I were to make a business transaction of 10,000 dollars that money would have to checked by a bank and that takes time to process. It'd be even harder if we lived in a "gold backed" world. You'd literally need to have people weighing gold constantly to see if we have the equivalent amount to make a transaction.
tl;dr gold is fucking stupid.
gold is a shiny metal and should be used in electronics not banking. wealth and services will soon be digital making for instantaneous transactions of money across the world.
>Our economy started on bartering
Economist here, contrary to popular belief barter economics are actually very rare. It turns out that the ideas of credit and debit are very very old.
>making elements in a nuclear reactor
There's literally no way that could be profitable
are you aware of the incredible cost per gram of that shit?
i bet my ass that only the merury isotope costs more than gold per gram when isolated.
>you have to be able to print more money for an economy to advance
That's not really advancement it is fake.
1) gold has physical uses that make is a commercially in demand commodity (in electronics, jewelry)
2) Gold never TARNISHES or BEAKS DOWN
-something made of gold 10,000 years ago will look the same today as it did then; this makes it very valuable as most metals corrode/oxidize
3) Gold is visually appealing dude to point no.2; something pretty and shinny will remain pretty and shinny no matter how many people touch,wear or use it.
4) it's rare, inflating it's value naturally since there isn't much of it to go around.
The usefulness and necessity of a fiat money is the hardest redpill of all, bc you need to study some fucking economic policy.
DAMN YOU JOOS!!!
If you have economic advancement without increasing the money supply you get deflation, which is really bad.
It's an accepted device of exchange for centuries because it is rare, doesn't tarnish or rust or corrode, it's indestructable, can be melted down and mixed with other metals and separated again.
Point is, gold isn't inherently money, it's that it's rarity and properties make it very useful as a medium of exchange. That's why humans have used it as such for centuries. Paper money is none of these things and unless directly backed and exchangeable by gold, it is worth only what people believe it is worth.
jokes on you I buy silver
the only reason to increase the money supply is to adjust for population growth
first you laugh at OP because you 'cant print gold'
now you laugh at me because 'printing gold is expensive'
i won't bother posting zero point energy, you don't deserve it.
>Digital currency
Fuck that noise
A scarce, precious metal with more uses than just jewelry. That's about all I can think of.
>mfw I just wrote my final on the Gold Standard and received a 90%
wew lad
/thread
there will always be a value for gold because you have pay people to mine it this is called the proof of work concept
If you went full absolute madman you could flood the market with your gold produced in thousands of nuclear reactors
How much gold can you even produce with that method?
What if you run out of your isotope?
make sense. the user I replied to was extolling ht evirtues of paper money inflation
>Not a lot of elements have the same properties as gold
not one
>In fact bank notes are promissory notes
truth
> there is not enough gold to equate the wealth of millions of people
supply and demand, a tiny amount of gold can be valuable if there is only a limited amount
>So governments and financial institutions would be capped on the basis of the amount of gold or silver there are in the world and that doesn't really make sense when you are talking about things like bonds.
not true
>tl;dr gold is fucking stupid.
tl;dr you are stupid, or misinformed
>Economist here
hahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaah
is economics a science? is there any control group in you're experiments?
curses, we are all fooled. got any 5oz coins?
>i won't bother posting zero point energy
derp
literally every field of engineering has a use for gold
how do you facilitate the transaction of billions of dollars on a currency backed by gold? how does one insure that there exists the equivalent amount of gold when dealing with trillions of dollars?
The USA mines 200 tons of gold every year. Your method wouldn't even work. Gold is created when two neuron stars collapse into each other and create gamma radiation.
>muh supply and demand
stop running your jaw. you probably only took one course in economics and you think s&d can be applied to every situation when its just trying to model a very basic situation.
fucking idiot.
some user already pointed it out. there is a limited amount of gold and that would lead to a deflationary currency which is bad because it limits the amount of transactions that can be made.
Because gold is a actual money, money is just paper I.O.Us
The concept of money was supposed to be that you collect a wealth of resources and trade in some to get an IOU from the bank which the man holding the paper could now go trade for resources. But the scheme is that they want people to be entirely reliant on the paper, as they continue to hoard what remains, the price of real commodities such as stone, iron, gold and whatnot, will skyrocket.
tl;dr the value of paper currency will continue to fall against the value of real materials.
>gold has use for things other than simple means of exchange
Yes, I'm sure you can use the flimsy, low melting point metal has a use for all sorts of projects
>Can someone explain to me what makes gold money?
you can take it to China and get opium for it, can't do that with cash,
opium is good for ruling people and wars hence the UK veteran day is called poppy day
First, we mine 200 tons every year. Second, we had a gold standard until 1971 and American economy was outpacing every other major nation. Third, the petrodollar was the replacement for the gold standard. If we had a gold standard we would no longer need the Sauds as an ally.
>how can you get the tools when you have nothing to trade that the blacksmith wants? This is where currency comes in.
whores are better
currency or whores but it's pretty much the same thing
>About 10% is used in coinage or in the financial stores of governments.
geology.com
>muh supply and demand
oh go on then, disprove
>you probably only took one course in economics
economics isn't science
>some user already pointed it out.
oh wow, concusive
and while you are at it, explain fractional reserve banking
>tl;dr the value of paper currency will continue to fall against the value of real materials.
it has to
>First, we mine 200 tons every year
the entire world output of gold, forever would fit in one football field
the thing that makes gold valuable is the same thing that makes pussy valuable...people want it. how many people have you seen wearing jewelry made out of paper or bitcoins?
But you didn't answer my question.
How does a bank facilitate the transaction of billions of dollars every single day from numerous sources from around the world?
You literally would not have internet shopping or banking with a gold currency.
>Can someone explain to me what makes gold money?
once processed you can consume it to live longer
that gives it value
