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Gold is not valuable because we “decided” it’s valuable. This gets repeated a lot, but it’s wrong. Gold is an amazing element with very many applications. Due

Gold is not valuable because we “decided” it’s valuable. This gets repeated a lot, but it’s wrong. Gold is an amazing element with very many applications. Due to its rarity on the mantle and difficulty in extracting it we use inferior, still expensive, but far more affordable alternatives (I.e. copper for many, but not all, applications). Othewise your mobo manufacturer wouldn’t have blown it’s margins putting gold traces. And a Chinese “recycler” wouldn’t give up their health to recover it. And this is without going into the aesthetics of gold. As engineers I guess many of us are uncomfortable with something as hard to quantity as aesthetics, but Au is almost universally considered pretty. Few metals aren’t off grey, and those that are tarnish. So no, there wasn’t a council of info-Europeans and African tribes 10k years ago to decide that Au is worth a lot just because.

moate 8y ago
I mean, most of the historic value in gold is not related to conductivity and almost entirely on aesthetics and scarcity (and the fact that you can mint gold into coins without lose an infinite number of times, but silver and copper also work there). "Pretty" is cultural. It's made up. It isn't objective. The industrial applications of gold come pretty recently relative to the cultural valuation of gold. The fact that everyone, everywhere thought gold was pretty 10,000 years ago AND it's elemental AND it has chemical properties that make it useful for applications now is why it's valuable. But it's still survivor bias and retconning that the Mayans and Romans had any clue what future applications there would be for gold.