wood for sheep?
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Gold isn't terribly useful as a metal. Sure it's valuable but mostly because people see it as valuable and perceptions can change.
Everyone needs a place to live and on top of that land can be used for making money even if land itself isn't as lucrative.
The same can be said for banknotes, they are quite useless as paper, they are mostly valuable because people see them as valuable and perceptions can change
I'm gonna start carrying houses, food and water in my wallet instead
Dragon ball had it right. Fuck storing Pokémon. I wanna carry around my house
Right but at least bank notes are easy to use and don't require a scale.
Right, which is why using gold for a currency replacement is folly. They're both valued based on something other than their real world applications, so if you trust one to stay relevant, you should probably trust the second as well.
Crypto Bois reading this
Yes and no.
Gold has been used as a currency historically for many reasons. It's inert. It has a low melting point. It's malleable and easily divisible. It doesn't tarnish. A piece of gold from 2,000 years ago will be the same weight today as it was then. It also is attractive, which gives it value for jewelry. And, importantly, it's predictably rare and can be mined.
Today, it's also valuable for electronics. Its inability to tarnish makes it fantastic if you need a connection to be corrosion resistant.
There's a reason gold still holds its value even though it's not used for currency anymore.
Gold's value isn't tied to its usefulness. Based on statista, less than 7% of global gold use is for "technology". The rest of it goes to jewellery, investments and banks.
The quantity you need for gold to be as useful as it's going to be in whatever application short of aesthetic/monetary value is so low that it just doesn't make sense for its value to be tied to its actual use. So little gold is used for "real" applications that if that was driving its valuation , it'd be probably 10% as valuable as it is. That's what people mean when they say it isn't useful.
I’m pretty sure you are wrong about that. Gold is one of the best conductors, it is extremely malleable, used in dentistry and medicine, electronics, it even protects against radiation.
Gold is extremely useful, just an fyi you are incorrect
Gold is a worse conductor than copper, a much more common metal. There are many metals that are more malleable. Dentistry has moved away from gold and is typically only used for aesthetics. In electronics gold is mostly used to resist corrosion and it's typically electroplated to do so, because of this the amount of gold use is incredibly small. Finally, almost every metal protects against radiation, hell even skin does that to most radiation and where that differs is in ionizing radiation where most of the time lead is easier to use than gold.
You are incorrect, but I don’t really care that much
If they produce mass H2 burning cells gold and platinum will rise in price drastically
I doubt fuel cells will take off in mass because of many reasons but mostly because H2 is so damn hard to store. Ultimately fuel cells are a tech for electrical storage and at one point they felt logical but as technology improves they begin to have more troubles. Storing hydrogen is just so damn difficult and it needs to be compressed to reach density for mobile applications.