Comment on Currency

stupidcasey@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• Stitch0815@feddit.org ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This comment actually made me think and look it up. I never thought about this. Why is gold valuable?

  Yeah you were basically right. Because societies decided it would be. I mean gold has some practical applications but nothing that would justify it’s price.

  First link I found says this:

  • Gold’s value is ultimately a social c- onstruction; its worth is sustained by ourcollective agreement about its importance and our belief in its future value.

  • Gold’s physical properties—its lustrous quality, relative scarcity, durability, and difficulty of extraction—reinforce and justify its perceived value.

  • Unlike other precious metals, gold strikes a balance of being rare enough to be precious but abundant enough to serve as a practical medium of exchange.

  So I guess rare enough yet abundand enough and durable enough.

  Wild tbh

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  • GentriFriedRice@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Planet money had great episode on this topic if you’re interested npr.org/…/-price-of-gold-periodic-table-elements

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  • Rooster326@programming.dev ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    But without gold how will we ever make high quality HDMI cables?

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  • Gathorall@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s a bit light on the “balance” many metals are precious and fairly rare, their physical characteristics like being poisonous, being visually indistinguishable from various cheap metals or malleable to the degree they will wear out as a coin are some issues.

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  • TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Now look up conspiracy theorists who are obsessed with gold standard and its abandonment.

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  • Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Btw, we just transmuted our first gold just recently.

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    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah but was the process cheaper than buying it? Converting a million dollars of lanthenides and energy into a few thousand dollars of gold isn’t a great trade off

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      • Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Well, no. And I think it was just not a few atoms. But we did it.

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• ulterno@programming.dev ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Even so, in a scenario where all the currencies fall apart, Gold and Silver are very probable to become the basis of wealth.
  Nowadays, stuff like SiIicon and Copper are pretty high value (and similarly, Germanium), but they really depend a lot upon hard to measure purity which goes with high-technology.
  So Gold and Silver, which are easier to determine with lower technology (unless someone uses high-technology to spoof them) and also easier to make into useful products, will tend to hold intrinsic value.

  Value of iron and others, break down due to abundance, while steel depends upon technology and expertise.

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  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Also because gold and silver are what people will mentally default to. Even if you develop a quick, easy, and free test to determine the purity of cobalt or neodymium and demonstrate how they’re more functionally valuable, people will still default to trading au and ag to buy the amount of those metals they need. Copper would be next.

    So why gold? Because everyone knows that enough people will trade for it, in the same way you know your landlord, grocer, and bar will all take your country’s currency, and that’s why you accept it in exchange for your labor

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    • ulterno@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah, and that’s why crypto is not catching up well.
      Kind of a chicken and egg thing.

      But in case of Gold and Silver, there had to be some initial driving factor for when it was first popularised (before people just started mentally defaulting to it).
      Even though archaeology suggests that there were some civilisations did use notational currency in times before the relatively modern, well known history, enough of them did go with Gold. And since this was during the time when long distance trade was way slower, I won’t consider the case of some single power influencing everyone else without any other driving force behind Gold itself.

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      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I think the fact that they’re pretty, nonreactive, rare, and were available very early is huge here. Gold is just there sometimes, little flakes and beads washed to rhe surface. It’s one of the only metals you find non metallurgical cultures using. From there it became valuable for jewelry and ritual objects because of its rarity and appearance, and once you have something durable, reworkable, and more desired than possessed it becomes a really easy thing to trade, especially when cross culturally valued.

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• ooterness@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The word “fluctuating” implies the price of gold has been going up and down. That is not what has happened since the Commander-In-Thief took office.

  Market price of one ounce of gold over the last five years: Image

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  • stupidcasey@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s a zoom out of 5 years Gold prices don’t move in a straight line. On a day‑to‑day and week‑to‑week basis, there are ups and downs - it zigzags it is absolutely fluctuating but the bigger problem is the sharp incline which suggests it is in a bubble.

    And none of any of that has anything to do with anything I said.

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• kameecoding@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Gold is nothing but an uncertainty indicator proxy, if gold price goes up, people are unsure in the market and future returns and thus buy gold, if the price is low the market and economy feels stable and people don’t buy gold

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