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"Iridium is one of the nine least abundant stable elements in Earth's crust, having an average mass fraction of 0.001 ppm in crustal rock; gold is 40 times more abundant, platinum is 10 times more abundant, and silver and mercury are 80 times more abundant." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium#cite_note-greenwood-5

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Silver is only double as abundant as Gold?

But 20x less demand dating back thousands of years. Weird huh?

There was a great article I read about this question a few years ago, I couldn't find it though.

Basically the question was why gold and not silver, platinum, etc., as the desireable metal for commerce/jewelry. The answer lies in golds uniqueish properties, it is rare (not the rarest), it is unique in color (platinum is hard to distinguish from other metals by sight), where gold is confused for other things or to determine its quality a simple bite test will determine its quality, without needing to melt it down (unlike silver colored metals), it's soft enough to be easily formed into jewelry.

Not an article, but here's a podcast that goes into that: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/07/131363098/the-t...

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