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Comment by cowls | Hacker News Reader

Gold is not money... you should say "when I use dollars as money"

This brings up a point I've never really understood about the hoarding of gold. Why? Let's say there is some catastrophic meltdown of society and money is a thing of the past. What am I supposed to do with the bar of gold you trade me for goods? Rather than assume that everyone's still on board the "gold is valuable and not just rocks" train, isn't it far more sensible to trade goods or services for goods or services? I would think that, in that I am exchanging a thing that I cannot use just so I can later exchange it for something I Can use, I am using gold as money. (Same deal if I trade goods for shoes that are the wrong size or handfuls of scratch 'n sniff stickers.)

Under what definition of money is that? Gold is and has always been money.

Try telling that to the cashier at the local grocery store.

Gold is not generally accepted as payment for goods and services in any culture that I know of (excluding jewelry and metal stores, of course). I'd be genuinely interested to hear about places where you can still take a lump of gold to a store and pay with it.

You're confusing money with legal tender. But in any case, you can just travel to the Utah: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/us/30gold.html?pagewanted=...

> You're confusing money with legal tender.

I don't think I am. Something can be generally accepted as payment for goods and services without it being legal tender.

> But in any case, you can just travel to the Utah

That article is about coins produced by the US mint, not lumps of gold. And even so, the article says, "so far, it is hard to find anyone who is using gold or silver to buy anything."

Isn't your argument equivalent to saying that Latin isn't a language, because it's hard to find anyone who uses it to chat?

Gold is money, it just has been superseded for most uses. And even so, when dollars are harder to use, gold is still used for some large transactions: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732435200...

You can read many Latin works, and find the language taught in many schools. Since it isn't spoken except in a handful of limited contexts, it gets the special qualifier "dead language." Gold is basically a "dead money." Hung onto by various people for historical and religious legacies, but not really suited for modern use.

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