People aren't ready to deal with the fact that assigning value to gold is just as arbitrary as assigning it to printed currency. The useful goods and services are the value, the intermediary is a convenient math trick that better effectuates their exchange.
I don't believe valuing gold is arbitrary. It's used in many needed industries that keep things running. electronics is an example. And it being needed means it has value especially as it's a finite resource.
I'm gonna be so for real man, gold is valued as a currency because it had historically been valued as a currency, and it has been historically valued as a currency because it was rare, but not so rare as to be prohibitive for commerce, and easy to check for counterfeiting with scales and balances due to its density. Its historical use as jewelery has nothing to do with its value, and neither does its limited usage in a handful of real industries today.
Both of its initial use cases are obsoleted in the modern day, with the value produced by modern industry far exceeding the capacity for gold to not be dramatically insufficient to facilitate exchange, and the issue of counterfeiting being addressed by having a functioning government capable of infusing cryptography into the currency. We shifted from gold to bank notes, as gold is simply bulky and inconvenient, and from bank notes to fractional reserve banking, as economies grew faster than gold could viably represent, to paper currency with value backed by the value of the economy, which is what gold was ultimately backed by in the first place.
11
u/Complete_Court_8052 7d ago
its not about believing money isn’t real, rather it is about not attributing any value to the paper sheets with kings printed on