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It’s nothing like buying gold. Gold is widely considered to be beautiful, and was considered a store of very high value in many cultures that were completely is
by CPLX 8y ago
It’s nothing like buying gold. Gold is widely considered to be beautiful, and was considered a store of very high value in many cultures that were completely isolated from each other, and human desire for it has remained consistent for literally thousands of years.
Astonishingly, crypto even less defensible.
- TylerE 8y agoEven ignoring it's use in jeweler, gold has significant industrial value.
- mhluongo 8y agoNot that justifies its cost today, no. That's a commonly repeated fallacy by goldbugs.
- TylerE 8y agoIt literally justifies it's cost because they buy it. If it didn't justify it's cost they'd use other metals, no? Large corporations don't usually light money on fire for no reason.
- XorNot 8y agoGold enjoys a lot of fashionable demand. Which is very much why you shouldn't use it to store your money - because not enough is actually propping up that demand. It just has a longer historical inertia - if you want to see a future problem, depending on the mineralogical analysis of near earth asteroids we could be in for a long slow decline if it's abundant up there.
- TylerE 8y agoI'm not talking about it's use for fashion. I'm talking about industrial usage - like the contacts on your CPU. Gold offers a unique combination of very high electrical conductivity and near-immunity to corrosion.
- Kiro 8y agoThe industrial usage is still unrelated to the price. The amount needed is tiny so the high cost is not a factor.
- arcticbull 8y agoExcept that they buy it at that price
- Kiro 8y agoYes, but price doesn't matter since it's such tiny amounts. The gold price for each part is miniscule compared to other costs.
- tim333 8y agoGold has been more stable in real value that pretty much anything else over the last 6000 years. Land being the only comparable asset I can think of. Way more stable than paper or crypto money. You shouldn't store your wealth in it because it's kind of stable while income producing assets make money.
- phamilton 8y ago> If it didn't justify it's cost they'd use other metals, no?. Industrial use has gone down. They have started using other metals. As an example, the Pentium Pro used significantly more gold than modern CPUs do.
- xchaotic 8y agoThe current gold price is a combination of industrial usage value (price higher than coal as it's more rare) and perceived value, but the difference is not that huge compared to other metals, so I would say the goldbugs are not completely wrong.
- raintrees 8y agoThere are comparisons being made that 1 gold coin used to provide 1 Roman toga, a good pair of leather shoes, and a good belt. And the comparison suggests looking at the cost of today's fine suite, with good leather shoes and said belt. If true, gold's value has not risen, the currency's value it is being measured with has gone down.
- lukeschlather 8y agoI mean, I think Bitcoin is really beautiful. I'm not sure it's as multipurpose as gold is (it certainly doesn't seem to have many uses.) But the basic idea really is a beautiful algorithm. I'm just not sure it has serious applications. Which is definitely unlike gold.
- threeseed 8y agoThe point is that gold is beautiful to most of the world. Bitcoin is beautiful to maybe a few hundred people.
- Myrmornis 8y agoI’d say the point is that one can appreciate the beauty of bitcoin design without owning any, whereas appreciation of gold is much more tightly connected to physical interaction with a gold artifact. At least in sane people.
- hasa 8y agoBitcoin is really ugly. The utterly ugly algorithm requires storing of enormous amounts of waste data and requires extremely unefficient computational work of "mining". It's just a showcase of human greediness and stupidity.
- dnautics 8y agoGold's value does not come from its beauty. It comes from its verifiability. If someone presents you a sample of gold you can very quickly verify its authenticity and approximate purity with very little technology.
- khuey 8y agoPiles of cow manure are readily verifiable but have comparatively little value.
- MichaelApproved 8y agoWhile funny, it's actually not easy to verify the quality of manure. > Animal manures are a valuable source of nutrients for crop growth. But, since every farm operation is different, each manure will have unique characteristics. Make regular laboratory manure analysis an important step in your manure and nutrient management planning. Understand that the total nutrient content in manure is not available the first year and that some nutrients may be lost depending on management practices. https://extension.umn.edu/manure-land-application/manure-characteristics https://extension.umn.edu/manure-land-application/manure-cha...
- ineedasername 8y agolet's not be so down on cow manure. Sure in small quantities cow manure is an inconvenience you wipe off your shoe. But in very, very large quantities it's an extremely useful argricultural material you can build a business around. (fertilizer)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dnautics 8y agoThere is a web service that sends animal manure to people if you would like to use it as a medium of exchange.
- luckydata 8y agooh man, step away from stuff you don't understand before you get lectured to death... never mind, I see others have already proceeded to do that.
- DanBlake 8y agoGolds value comes entirely from the fact that we as a society give it value. The beauty line doesnt work, because then platinum shouldnt have any serious value despite its rarity (it just looks like silver basically) The industrial value is laughable, but read comments below/above to debate that more at length. The scarcity line doesn't work, because you have elements like bismuth which are also (Arguably) more beautiful than gold https://66.media.tumblr.com/61ce390242a79a767772d4b2027eb902/tumblr_miukex8tDs1qam8b5o1_1280.jpg https://66.media.tumblr.com/61ce390242a79a767772d4b2027eb902... but command prices far less despite being .025 vs .0031 on the PPM abundance on earth. Or even look at ruthenium which has a similar look to platinum and is even rarer than gold. Did I mention it also goes for about 400 an ounce? Quite a savings over gold. The only thing that makes sense is that we as a collective have decided gold has value of X.
- jjoonathan 8y agoSupply and demand determine the value of everything and they are both additive. Each piece of supply tips the price scale lower, each piece of demand tips it higher. You have taken several key pieces off the scale, argued (unconvincingly) that each one individually cannot explain the scale's reading, and then (even more unconvincingly) claimed that the scale's reading is therefore completely arbitrary. It isn't. You just don't seem to understand how it works.
- autokad 8y ago> "Golds value comes entirely from the fact that we as a society give it value." thats true for anything. that includes currencies, what you get paid, the value of a hockey card, the value of a car, the value of a banana, etc. sure, if society doesn't want to pay you anything for 'it', you can do with it what you want, like eat the banana (before it becomes worthless to anyone). I am not a gold bug, i personally dont think its a great investment. its not a hedge against a declining market, and its difficult to own in large quantities. however; statements like 'its only valued because people give it value' are not very informative. everything is valued that way. everything. also, the industrial value of gold is not laughable. its negligible because we have plenty of gold to meet industrial needs. but its not laughable, its in your smart phone, its in your desktop / laptop, etc.