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Comment by creetioc | Hacker News Reader

You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food.

Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.

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This can’t be a serious comment. If ww3 starts the respective countries central banks will keep the gold for themselves. You are so naieve if you think any government is going to honour the fact that you have a piece of paper that saya you own some gold in their vault.

It is not like they haven't done lot to collect it off the population in such scenarios during previous crises. My guess is that if WW3 breaks out. For duration your gold will have rather little use. At best you get price set by government. At worst it will be confiscated. And black market will probably be only place to use it.

And post WW3. If there is economy left. It will be while before people lock back on gold.

> You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts

If you want something you can trade post ww3 also stockpile alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc. . Small luxuries everyone will be willing to trade for in a post war country.

Sugar and salt are non-perishable if stored in right conditions. Later one does not get too much use. But first one can be turned to drugs and those are always popular.

> goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead

Wouldn't they just take your gold and pressgang you? Double win for them.

Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.

Where is your gold? Buried in your garden? Or is it an accounting entry at some commodities trading firm?

You can easily trade gold until someone can force it from you.

The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.

A year of my salary is between 1lbs to 2lbs of gold at current prices. Hiding a few pounds of something isn't very difficult, I do it every Christmas.

It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).

How would you go about using 1lb of gold to procure food, water and fuel in a crisis bad enough to disable government/banking?

History has shown than people usually lose all their gold in situations like this, pretty much all the time.

A hacksaw? Just cut it into smaller chunks.

Fur future readers: I was making a joke about Christmas dinner if that wasn't clear.

> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable.

But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't see the difference to Bitcoin, GME, or TSLA, "I'm going to hoard this because tomorrow (for an infinite amount of tomorrows) someone else will want to buy it at a higher price!".

Yeah yeah yeah, gold can also be used for technology (e.g. as a non-reactive metal), but copper is useful in technology too...

Sheep is probably a better thing to own. You can eat it, or you can take its wool to make clothes to keep yourself warm. You can't eat gold.

Gold has been used as a store of value for bascially all of recorded human civilization.

Sheep get sick and die, and you have to feed them.

Civilization has had a habitable planet for the entirity of its run. When food and water are scarce, what good will metal do?

Yeah, when food and water are scarce, rearing sheep will be hard too.

Also what are you going to do when your tiny gold coin is worth thousands of dollars? Shave off tiny flakes of it and trade it for eggs?

You could write on a piece of paper that says you promise to give the bearer of that paper gold of the equivalent value..

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