That's the fun thing about gold. It's literal gold, not numbers on a spreadsheet. Moving it really means moving it: bars are stamped and owned, and if the owner wants to move them, those bars need to get transported to wherever the owner says they should be.
It's also the idiotic thing about gold, a metal that has no more or less inherent monetary value than a fiat currency =)
>inherent monetary value
I agree, the price of gold depends on demand like everything else. Although gold just has some inherent utility value in addition to scarcity that makes it less likely for the price to go to zero, other stuff like cryptocurrency have only scarcity and can go to zero much more easily.
gold has quite the inherent value - no oxygen reaction (all electronics) and partly jewelry.
if the gold has cheaper would be used quite alot due to being the only metal not oxidizing (the other one being platinum which is even rarer and comes from the same ore source)
> It's also the idiotic thing about gold, a metal that has no more or less inherent monetary value than a fiat currency =)
I don’t know why people keep repeating that. Half of gold production is used in industry and for jewellery. And gold has never lost its value the way that some paper currencies have. It’s not like anyone can print gold bars.
That is the non idiotic thing about gold, since it is not fiat, is not easy to produce, and it is easy to verify, it can be used as a currency in less stable times/places. It’s a redundancy. Perhaps bitcoin satisfies many of these properties without the high costs to secure and move gold, but it needs electricity and a network?
https://www.macrotrends.net/1335/dollar-vs-gold-comparison-l...
Currency is inherently about trust: you believe it can be traded later for goods. The mechanism with fiat is that you need to trust your state and government.
In gold, you trust that everyone is believing gold has value. And that it is commmon knowledge (in the logic sense [0])
Saying that gold has no more or less inherent monetary value than fiat currency assuming a magic wand that can change a large percentage of people's belief.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)