Never understood the appeal of bit coin. Its vulnerabilities always seemed obvious to me.
Yeah, imagine a token that had value only because everyone that used it agreed it had value...
Like the dollar?
Or gold? It's only priced so high because people will accept it. If they won't, the price will crash. While it has industrial uses, they don't justify the high price.
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Or gold? It's only priced so high because people will accept it. If they won't, the price will crash. While it has industrial uses, they don't justify the high price.
It has more than industrial use. It's the most precious monetary metal for a reason, and that's based on its many valuable properties (malleability, beauty, non-tarnishing, non-rusting, etc.) combined with its rarity. It's the "perfect storm" metal. You need to study up a little. A great book on the subject is available free online titled "What Has The Government Done To Our Money."
TRH is correct. If history repeated itself gold in all likelihood would still be the currency of the realm. It is the Goldilocks of scarcity, and has a very low smelting point (early history=low tech forge). As TRH menionedthe cultural significance of the material and its various qualities.
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. � WARREN G. BENNIS
I don't often agree with Hawkeye, but I believe he is spot on with regards to this. It's availability and many uses prevent it from being used as a currency though.
to me gold is largely pointless.....should the worst happen its largely going to be a PITA and your gonna get screwed over in the long run.....reason? with the price of gold that high its all the sudden become a PITA to buy most the chit your actually gonna need in the day to day course of life.....a gold eagle is nice to have and all but a beotch to buy a loaf of bread with when its worth 500 loaves of bread....
A serious student of the "Armchair Safari" always looking for Africa/Asia hunting books
I don't often agree with Hawkeye, but I believe he is spot on with regards to this. It's availability and many uses prevent it from being used as a currency though.
Quite the contrary. Precisely those characteristics, plus its divisibility, fungibility, etc., made it the perfect money, the choice in this regard (along with silver) for six thousand years.
Gold and silver is the only real money. Paper money can be used for public debts only which would give it intrinsic value. However, because of the size of our nation that to would be corrupt in no time at all.
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In this vid, Brother Nate goes against Ron Paul. Not sure how I feel about it.
Brother Nate is wrong on this. Fiat currency, he says, is fine so long as its volume is fixed. While this is theoretically true, what he fails to understand is that if people are in charge of the volume of currency, it will always be expanded for one excuse or another, thus robbing its possessors of its value and transferring it to whatever corruption was behind expanding it. It's human nature.
The beauty of permitting gold and silver to serve their natural functions as money (which would mean, in part, making it a serious crime to print up more currency than there is gold and silver to back it) is that you cannot print any. Mining is hard work, and only produces so much annually no matter how hard they try.
His suggestion that legally freeing gold and silver for use as money again would result in massive starvation is an argument made by someone who doesn't actually understand the free market, someone who places his trust in government managing the market instead. In a truly free market, few able bodied people would starve because there'd be an over abundance of available work. And private insurance, family, and charity, take care of those who are not able bodied far more efficiently than government programs.
Yeah, the only issue I have with a Gold Standard is the sheer volume it would take to back all that paper money.
There just isn't enough for 7 billion peoples financial dealings, is there?
Each dollar today is exchangeable on the open market for one-thirteen-hundredth of an ounce of gold. That valuation could easily be fixed by decree. Of course our massively bloated government is unsustainable under a real money standard, and would thus need to revert back to pre-1913 levels of activity or it would not be able to afford all that it does, which it cannot do even now under a massively inflated fiat currency. All public debt would also need to be defaulted on. Nations have done this throughout history and survived just fine. Since all that debt was based on fraud to start with, I have no problem with this. It would just mean the US Government would have a hard time getting loans in the future, which is a good thing.
There is, but the incremental value of each unit of gold would have to find its proper level of value.
Someone I'm sure knows how much gold there is currently in the world, but for discussion's sake let's say there are 1 million ounces (there's more, I know). If there were 1 billion people in the world the gold would be divided among them. 7 billions people seeking after 1 million ounces would make each ounce worth 7 times more, all else being equal.
Silver would have to come back as well as copper for lesser transactions.
Even then, coins of known value could be subdivided. Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar - folks used to cut silver dollars into 8 slivers and use them for smaller transactions, that's where that saying came from.
Gunnery, gunnery, gunnery. Hit the target, all else is twaddle!
Would gold shoot to $100,000 an ounce for instance?
It seems like total anarchy would ensue.
You could just declare that money is once again gold and silver (as the US Constitution requires already), without fixing a dollar value to X amount of it, and let the market determine its worth per ounce. Right now it's under the handicap of being criminal to use it as money. Just lift that.
I don't often agree with Hawkeye, but I believe he is spot on with regards to this. It's availability and many uses prevent it from being used as a currency though.
Quite the contrary. Precisely those characteristics, plus its divisibility, fungibility, etc., made it the perfect money, the choice in this regard (along with silver) for six thousand years.
You need to reread that. It's world economic growth that makes gold impractical.
There is, but the incremental value of each unit of gold would have to find its proper level of value.
Someone I'm sure knows how much gold there is currently in the world, but for discussion's sake let's say there are 1 million ounces (there's more, I know). If there were 1 billion people in the world the gold would be divided among them. 7 billions people seeking after 1 million ounces would make each ounce worth 7 times more, all else being equal.
Silver would have to come back as well as copper for lesser transactions.
Even then, coins of known value could be subdivided. Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar - folks used to cut silver dollars into 8 slivers and use them for smaller transactions, that's where that saying came from.
And we would be right back to "printing" gold notes so the whole issue is moot.