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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> Gold is good for nothing useful imo, but is used in jewlery and other because it has value (not the other way around, as in gold has value because people make jewelry with it).

You do know that gold has super low reactivity and it's a very good conductor, right? :-)

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The vast majority of mined gold in existence is not used for industrial purposes.

But industrial use is big (see the link from the other poster, 37% in the US), and growing. Gold is a very useful material and not only for its shininess.

The current pricing of gold has nothing, repeat after me, nothing to do with its industrial use.

(Irrelevant Truth Rhetorical Fallacy)

This is an underappreciated possibility of bitcoin.

All that insane amount of gold that's collecting dust in vaults being used as a store of value? Suddenly free to be used productively if bitcoin replaces it. Same with real estate that owners let sit unsed because they're primarily using it as a store of value rather than a productive asset.

How often is it used for that use case? Does gold have a high value due to this? No. I would even say that we might see more use industrially if people weren’t inflating its price by using it as a store of value.

> How often is it used for that use case?

100% of all cases. You just used gold to ask that question.

Most gold is not used for industrial purposes

37% of gold use in the US is for electronics.

https://geology.com/minerals/gold/uses-of-gold.shtml

Unless I'm mistaken, this is showing gold used for anything but storage of value. So that number is misleading.

Stats that include gold used as a store of value show much different numbers. But as I said earlier, the price of gold was never inflated by industrial use, it’s the other way around. The good thing about bitcoin: you’re investing in something that won’t negatively impact real world use cases.

Well, low reactivity is why it stays shiny, right? People like the shiny squishy heavy rocks

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