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Comment by mhluongo | Hacker News Reader

Not that justifies its cost today, no. That's a commonly repeated fallacy by goldbugs.

It literally justifies it's cost because they buy it. If it didn't justify it's cost they'd use other metals, no?

Large corporations don't usually light money on fire for no reason.

Gold enjoys a lot of fashionable demand. Which is very much why you shouldn't use it to store your money - because not enough is actually propping up that demand. It just has a longer historical inertia - if you want to see a future problem, depending on the mineralogical analysis of near earth asteroids we could be in for a long slow decline if it's abundant up there.

I'm not talking about it's use for fashion.

I'm talking about industrial usage - like the contacts on your CPU. Gold offers a unique combination of very high electrical conductivity and near-immunity to corrosion.

The industrial usage is still unrelated to the price. The amount needed is tiny so the high cost is not a factor.

Except that they buy it at that price

Yes, but price doesn't matter since it's such tiny amounts. The gold price for each part is miniscule compared to other costs.

Gold has been more stable in real value that pretty much anything else over the last 6000 years. Land being the only comparable asset I can think of. Way more stable than paper or crypto money. You shouldn't store your wealth in it because it's kind of stable while income producing assets make money.

> If it didn't justify it's cost they'd use other metals, no?.

Industrial use has gone down. They have started using other metals. As an example, the Pentium Pro used significantly more gold than modern CPUs do.

There are comparisons being made that 1 gold coin used to provide 1 Roman toga, a good pair of leather shoes, and a good belt. And the comparison suggests looking at the cost of today's fine suite, with good leather shoes and said belt.

If true, gold's value has not risen, the currency's value it is being measured with has gone down.

The current gold price is a combination of industrial usage value (price higher than coal as it's more rare) and perceived value, but the difference is not that huge compared to other metals, so I would say the goldbugs are not completely wrong.

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