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Comment by jakejake | Hacker News Reader

I personally think the "crazy" label kicks in when the person has severely diminished their actual, real life in order to prepare for an unlikely future scenario. Especially when that scenario is strangely specific and seems more like fantasy where the preparer will become a vigilante hero in the new world.

Simply being prepared for emergencies is certainly not crazy. Saving money for an employment emergency seems like the most real threat to most of us. But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse.

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There's a lot of things you can do that are even sometimes better for your well-being. Buying gold, for example, can be a relatively safe hedge against unemployment (and even science-fiction-level economic collapse).

Honest question: how does one buy currency with gold even under current circumstances? Let’s even forget the doomsday for a moment.

OP mentions gold as safe non-crazy way to protect savings against long-term inflation and depressions. However, from what I understand, any outsider would be extremely lucky to sell it at a rate anything close to the market, and common sense suggests that if dollar plunges it’d become proportionately trickier.

If selling it isn’t as tricky as it seems, then the reverse question comes up: how to buy it now without being ripped off?

Gold is used as carrying currency in places like zimbabwe where the official currency is too unreliable. People directly measure out quantities and weigh them, like in mining days but with more accuracy (digital scales). Presumably other forms of exchange are used for smaller denominations (goods for barter etc)

I think your confused about gold. Any coin shop or pawn shop in America will give you close to spot price in USD for the yellow metal. You don't even need to show ID.

The hard part has been.. how do you buy or sell or pay with gold electronically while having a convenient audit trail so that it's not a time consuming process to file your taxes, but that's also solved thanks to a startup founded in part by a senior paypal exec: https://www.bitgold.com/

> But I guess that's not as much fun as stock-piling guns and ammo for a zombie apocalypse.

Don't forget limitless quantities of beer and jerky.

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