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You can't eat gold and its industrial uses are quite limited. Gold is just fiat money that you have to dig out of the ground.

HAAAAMMMM 12y ago
Gold is deflationary, which is why people like you fear it.
- bandrami 12y ago
  I don't fear it; I'm amused by people who tell me that fiat currency is going to collapse any day now unlike super-safe gold, but that they will nonetheless be happy to exchange some of their super-safe gold for my soon-to-be-worthless fiat currency. Out of the goodness of their hearts or something.
  - adventured 12y ago
    The dollar has lost roughly 97% of its value (per the Fed's own assessment) since the Federal Reserve was created. And that's a good outcome, we could talk about the ruble, or the real, or the bolivar. Gold has not lost any value in the last century by comparison. Gold has plenty of issues, confidence as a store of value is not one of them. By comparison, the global economy is filled constantly with stories, from one country or another, of fiat being demolished through constant inflation / aggressive devaluation. Countries can drown their citizens via all sorts of schemes involving debt (ala Japan and the Yen), that then become currency devaluation schemes (QE) to debase that debt and chop down the standard of living of its citizens as a stealth move to pay for that debt. Such a thing inherently can't happen with gold. The Euro zone for example is in the middle of seeing its citizens standards of living chopped down via QE, to debase the vast debt that has been choking off the growth potential of much of Europe since 2007 (the European economy has seen zero net GDP growth since roughly 2007). How many Euro zone citizens understand what the ECB is doing to them exactly? Do they realize that what they're about to suffer, is what Americans went through from 2002 to 2014 as the Fed debased the dollar to try to avoid multiple recessions, leading to a substantial decline in the US standard of living? If the ECB drops the value of the Euro by 1/3 via QE, that substantially reduces in real terms the standard of living of anyone living on that currency. Gold shields against that abuse.
    - bildung 12y ago
      > Gold has not lost any value in the last century by comparison. Not in that artificial timeframe, but surly in many other periods: * it lost over 65% of its value between 1933 and 1970. * it lost over 82% of its value between 1980 and 2000. * it lost about 29% of its value the last two years. (http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-y...) Gold is a highly speculative asset.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        Well, that's the price of gold in USD. Saying that gold has "lost" or "gained" value only works if you hold USD as the frame of reference. Alternatively, you could invert the graph to say that USD is a highly speculative asset - relative to gold :)
        lmm 12y ago
        You can't eat gold. I'd be more interested to see their value measured in loaves of bread, apartments, or hours of human labour - the kind of thing I'm actually going to want to buy with my store of value.
        bildung 12y ago
        I see where you are coming from, but as these numbers are inflation adjusted the USD isn't really the frame of reference, the purchasing power is - as a result of adjusting for inflation the purchasing power represented by one USD stays constant, so USD can be cancelled out on both sides of the equation.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        RockyMcNuts 12y ago
        not if the dollar is more stable than gold vs. a broad basket of consumer and other traded goods and services.
    - 12y ago
CyberDildonics 12y ago
Gold has value for the same reason any money has value - it has strong properties of ideal money. It is not like fiat currencies in the sense of 'faith' that the scarcity will continue however. Right now we have some incentives that work to keep fiat currencies scarce, but those forces are not the same as what keeps gold scarce.

HAAAAMMMM 12y ago

Gold is deflationary, which is why people like you fear it.

bandrami 12y ago
I don't fear it; I'm amused by people who tell me that fiat currency is going to collapse any day now unlike super-safe gold, but that they will nonetheless be happy to exchange some of their super-safe gold for my soon-to-be-worthless fiat currency. Out of the goodness of their hearts or something.
- adventured 12y ago
  The dollar has lost roughly 97% of its value (per the Fed's own assessment) since the Federal Reserve was created. And that's a good outcome, we could talk about the ruble, or the real, or the bolivar. Gold has not lost any value in the last century by comparison. Gold has plenty of issues, confidence as a store of value is not one of them. By comparison, the global economy is filled constantly with stories, from one country or another, of fiat being demolished through constant inflation / aggressive devaluation. Countries can drown their citizens via all sorts of schemes involving debt (ala Japan and the Yen), that then become currency devaluation schemes (QE) to debase that debt and chop down the standard of living of its citizens as a stealth move to pay for that debt. Such a thing inherently can't happen with gold. The Euro zone for example is in the middle of seeing its citizens standards of living chopped down via QE, to debase the vast debt that has been choking off the growth potential of much of Europe since 2007 (the European economy has seen zero net GDP growth since roughly 2007). How many Euro zone citizens understand what the ECB is doing to them exactly? Do they realize that what they're about to suffer, is what Americans went through from 2002 to 2014 as the Fed debased the dollar to try to avoid multiple recessions, leading to a substantial decline in the US standard of living? If the ECB drops the value of the Euro by 1/3 via QE, that substantially reduces in real terms the standard of living of anyone living on that currency. Gold shields against that abuse.
  - bildung 12y ago
    > Gold has not lost any value in the last century by comparison. Not in that artificial timeframe, but surly in many other periods: * it lost over 65% of its value between 1933 and 1970. * it lost over 82% of its value between 1980 and 2000. * it lost about 29% of its value the last two years. (http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-y...) Gold is a highly speculative asset.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Well, that's the price of gold in USD. Saying that gold has "lost" or "gained" value only works if you hold USD as the frame of reference. Alternatively, you could invert the graph to say that USD is a highly speculative asset - relative to gold :)
      - lmm 12y ago
        You can't eat gold. I'd be more interested to see their value measured in loaves of bread, apartments, or hours of human labour - the kind of thing I'm actually going to want to buy with my store of value.
      - bildung 12y ago
        I see where you are coming from, but as these numbers are inflation adjusted the USD isn't really the frame of reference, the purchasing power is - as a result of adjusting for inflation the purchasing power represented by one USD stays constant, so USD can be cancelled out on both sides of the equation.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - RockyMcNuts 12y ago
        not if the dollar is more stable than gold vs. a broad basket of consumer and other traded goods and services.
  - 12y ago

CyberDildonics 12y ago

Gold has value for the same reason any money has value - it has strong properties of ideal money. It is not like fiat currencies in the sense of 'faith' that the scarcity will continue however. Right now we have some incentives that work to keep fiat currencies scarce, but those forces are not the same as what keeps gold scarce.