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Misses an important one - verifiability. Gold is valuable because there are stunningly low-tech methods for a counterparty to ascertain if the piece of gold yo

Misses an important one - verifiability. Gold is valuable because there are stunningly low-tech methods for a counterparty to ascertain if the piece of gold you hold in your hand is real, prior to, during, and after an exchange. In effect, gold as an exchange medium drives down the cost of trust. The article claims that there is no "intrinsic" value. Does this particular property count as "intrinsic"? It has to do with the specialness of gold in the periodic table and even requires the theory of relativity for the math to work out right (though the uniqueness of gold's property is not itself intrinsically due to relativity, but a happenstance of relative physical constants).

jjk166 6y ago
The lack of utility is a valuable trait for a currency. If a one dollar steel coin can be turned into a 5 dollar tool, then why would you keep your steel in the form of coins? But if you are trading in manufactured goods, you are essentially just bartering. Gold also benefits from its high density. If you are expecting 100 grams of money and have a scale that is accurate to 1 gram, someone can shave off .5 grams of material and convince you they are still giving you the full amount. The lighter money is, the more accurate your scales must be. On the other hand, making coins of the same material twice as heavy means using twice as much material: which both increases its bulkiness and cuts the number of coins in circulation in half. Making your coins from a dense material means you can have lots of small, easily carried coins instead of a smaller number of big bulky ones. Gold was the densest material known to antiquity and remains one of the densest materials on Earth.