Spidey wrote:As someone who works with electronics every day, I’m pretty sure you are wrong about the value of gold and silver to mankind, unless you don’t consider highly reliable connections, on such things as military aircraft and satellites useful.
Land would be useless too, if you didn’t use sweat equity to make it into something useful, such as a farm, or a Mall…
everything has 'some' use, but no one considers basing a currency upon silicon, do they?
Slick you really are hard-headed. I think maybe you need more people in your life to tell you you're wrong. Gold and silver. Not silicon, not cesium, not any one of the wonderful elements from your chemistry days that don't actually fit the bill. Not a chance universal acceptance. Rare, valuable, beautiful, useful, coin-able, workable, stable, end of story. Shut up.
and thank you, Thorne, for supporting my position which I've maintained throughout this thread. It's all about commercial acceptability. And, no one ever came up with an example wherein wealth was not essentially static, either.
"The Party told you to reject all evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
George Orwell---"1984"
callmeslick wrote:And, no one ever came up with an example wherein wealth was not essentially static, either.
We don't agree on which definition to use. My definition of wealth can be generalized as "stuff people value." And I've made a good case that you can create (and destroy) stuff that people value. If your definition of wealth doesn't, for instance, account for intellectual property, then I would argue that that's a symptom that your definition isn't useful and is outdated. But until we can agree on which definition is best, we can't make much progress here.
callmeslick wrote:and thank you, Thorne, for supporting my position which I've maintained throughout this thread. It's all about commercial acceptability. ...
callmeslick wrote:gold and silver only have value due to traditional acceptablity, not some inherent value to mankind.
My position, throughout this thread, is that it's more than tradition or acceptability. Gold is inherently valuable. I might even say that it's more inherently valuable, with less added labor, that anything else.
That's not really true at all, though. Platinum has historically traded significantly higher than gold, though its price is much more volatile, and it tends to dip substantially during periods of economic uncertainty.
Well TG, when the paper dollar becomes valueless, try using platinum as a means of exchange. Thorne is absolutely right.Gold has always been and will be the preferred and accepted monetary form when all else fails
You may have me there, TG. I would point out that platinum is a much more recent discovery (apparently more rare and difficult to work?). According to that article the earliest way to make platinum workable was to mix it with gold...
Using platinum to trade would be something like walking around with $1000 bills in your wallet, wouldn't it? It's also not so universally recognizable, I would say, because of its rarity.
Gold is the preferred currency because it is reasonably valuable while not being *that* rare or difficult to mine. There are plenty of minerals out there that are way more valuable than gold pound for pound, but wouldn't make suitable currency because they are too rare. Take weapons grade uranium for instance, pound for pound it is probably thousands of times more valuable than gold but wouldn't make a good currency because it is extremely rare and difficult to mine or refine. You need enough of something that pretty much everyone can have a share of it in order make a currency out of it, otherwise it won't work.
Yeah, gold is common enough for us to have a decent amount of it spread around, but still rare and useful enough to make it a decent commodity. I think I remember seeing that US bullion depositories do have some platinum stashed away, because why not. The only reason I'm personally familiar with its value is because of the summer research I did in undergrad: I was working with the compound platinum chloride, and the little vials the stuff came in worked out to around $100 per gram. Not exactly something you wanted to spill on the lab floor.
