Article is a brief review of the book "The Secret History of Gold" by Dominic Frisby.
It is interesting that gold was able to retain its value after the industrial revolution. It could have gone the way of aluminum, once twice as valuable as gold, but now used in disposable drink containers. At the time of the alchemists, there was no way to know that some metals were actually distillable from common rocks and others genuinely rare and impossible to manufacture with even quite advanced technology.
EDIT: Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway.
>Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway.
I think also the scarcity plays a factor, the estimates that I'm seeing after short search being that there's about 10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold.
This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.”
The cap on the washington monument is aluminum, because at the time it was still a precious metal.
The guy who figured out how to electrolyze it out of ore went on to create the main company in the US that produced it, and chose to call it aluminum instead of aluminium, thus leading to the split in spelling. That story may be apocryphal though.
>This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.”
Sure, but it also said "it could have gone the way of aluminum", which is mostly where my point rests: I don't really see how. The disparity of volume seems to explain it to me fully.
Sure, I guess just “disparity of accessible volume” being the key thing.
If we found a way to extract gold from seawater[0], for example, it would change the accessible volume of gold quite a bit.
[0]: https://www.discovermagazine.com/6-times-we-tried-to-extract...
There is now, but it wasn't really extractable at all until electrochemistry.
Right, but it was still there to extract. All it needed was electrochemistry.
Whereas with gold, it isn't there in the rocks - not in the same amounts. No future chemical wizardry is going to make it extractable, because it isn't there to extract.
To make gold more abundant is going to take transmutation, which is a much bigger ask.
Now, if you want to say that the ancients didn't know that aluminum was there and gold wasn't, and therefore lucked out by picking the one that wasn't there, I would agree with that.
The GGP said “10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold,” which the “processed” part, which is I think what GP was responding to: of course the scarcity of available gold relative to aluminum drives its value, but that relative scarcity only exists due to modern electrochemistry: previously, “processed” aluminum and gold were similarly scarce.
People talk about stuff like extracting gold from seawater, so it also isn’t a given that the scarcity difference will always remain what it is.
I think gold's chemistry actually is why gold has been and remains a store of value.
It is rare, inert, malleable, has a low melting point and has a distinct unique colour.
All of these are quite useful for being a store of value:
- inert: gold from 10000 years ago is basically exactly the same
- malleable: it is easy to subdivide for coinage (compare with diamonds for an extreme example)
- low melting point: easy to purify (and melting temp is a decent purity check)
- distinct colour: less useful now but being so distinct from other metals makes it easier to spot vs the many silvery coloured metals
The funny thing is that all these store of value properties also make it less useful: inert means it's not reactive and has fewer forms/compounds
Malleable, lower melting temp and rare makes it a poor choice for typical metal usages...
I'm amazed noone has quoted Warren Buffet on this subject:
“[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”
The principle point being: "It has no utility".
Like crypto, it's primary function in the modern economy is financial crime...
I've read elsewhere that one of gold's biggest virtues as a store of value on planet earth is that it isn't so rare as to be useless, but it's rare enough that it functions as currency or high value storage. A goldilocks material for the purpose of wealth transfer and storage.
It is also relatively easy to work, since ancient times. Iridium is the rarest metal, so rare and hard to work that it is not practical.
Yes! Exactly - there are plenty of other rare metals but many of them are really hard to work with. Iridium, Rhodium and Platinum are plenty rare but mankind has lacked the technology to do anything with them for most of history
It's also chemically inert and very dense, so a coin/ingot that weights a certain amount is smaller and can be stored for long periods of time. It's so dense that it's pretty much forgery-proof, as any material you use in the forgery is either more expensive or less dense.
> Its well-documented contributions to deflationary and financial crises, including the Depression, go curiously undiscussed in this book.
Why is deflation viewed as such a bad thing? If you've got savings in a deflationary time, your money becomes more valuable, not less. Don't we want to encourage savings?
If you have debts instead of savings, deflation is utterly ruinous. An awful lot of people have debts.
Deflation does far more damage than inflation. This is why the Federal Reserve fears deflation a lot more than deflation.
Gold has 0 FCF, 0 earnings, 0 dividends. The whole thesis is someone pays more later. At least equities have fundamentals to anchor the price to.
Paper/plastic currency (cash) has 0 FCF, 0 earnings, 0 dividends. The whole thesis is you trade it at a deprecated rate later.
You can trade gold and cash with people a lot more easily than an equity in your brokerage account.
It's just not the same when your crew has another ship's crew at its mercy, loaded blunderbusses at the ready, waiting for the leather sacks and chests full of bitcoin to be turned over.
No the thesis of cash is that it's a legally enforced means to extinguish debts within a certain legal jurisdiction.
A court cannot generally find that I must furnish someone with some weight of gold for example but they can find a monetary value in sovereign currency which I must supply.
The thesis of cash is that governments and their influencers can turn some knobs and decrease its value and enrich themselves simultaneously by creating more of it. A lot of it as debt for the normals.
incoherent
The thesis for gold is that it holds its value in times of war when companies and governments fall apart.
Any war that has the USD no longer be accepted has significant existential risk, and besides if things devolve that much you should be worrying about any entity holding the gold for you or someone killing you for the gold you personally hold.
Yeah man you missed the point. Gold is not good as an investment vehicle.
As a daily currency, it also has sharp downsides, but at least it’s not all bad.
I'm sorry, I didn't make my point well, that's on me. My point was that gold isn't just an investment.
I think the point is that when it comes to investment vehicles, gold generally beats cash. Oh and that means that in the last 20 years or so (ie. including the period where it didn't appreciate much), physical gold beats a balance in bank accounts.
Inflation means "interest" on gold, measured in reliable currencies like USD or EUR, is at least 4%. Far more than you will get from any bank.
Of course this goes for anything, so you might want to select something with less regulation attached to it. On the other hand, gold is really dense and "liquid" (easy to sell), which are great advantages to have for a store of wealth. And then there's the recent history of gold prices (which is due to the third world attempting to use anything but dollars but not succeeding at it, but one assumes it will end)
But yes, gold makes less than you'll probably get on the S&P500.
"You can trade gold ... easily"
Only for very large amounts of money. It can't easily be subdivided. Oh and this is illegal in most countries.
But yeah, what people forget is that gold is incredibly dense. Nearly double lead's density. This means 1kg of gold is about the size of a nokia 3360, and worth close to 150,000$. A very large amount of gold doesn't take up much volume at all.
... which also means that people "stealing gold" like in the bond movies is totally unrealistic. If you loaded a pallet of gold bars (12.5 kg a piece, 200 gold bars, about 2.5 tons, 375 million USD) into a standard van, that van would probably just break down. And carrying 10 gold bars, 20 million USD in a backpack? Not happening.
(which frankly Trump is abusing because of course the density of gold means that any facility storing gold, including Fort Knox, is going to "look empty")
Gold is popular as jewellery. The price is determined largely by the cost of mining it and so has remained somewhat stable compared to the cost of things like houses for centuries, far more so than other money like things.
You have a point. And yet, today, you can buy even more bread and clothes and materials with an ounce of gold than you could 2000 years ago. Meanwhile, what happened to all of the businesses and currencies over the last few millennia? Where will the FCF of any random company be in 50 years? Will gold still be valuable then?
The staying power of gold is a value in itself.
Correct: gold is a store of value, not an investment.
In an ideal world gold would be convertible to and from currency tax free so it could be used as such. A gold-backed currency is too constrained by the supply of gold in the world, but tax-free gold would allow people to avoid currency depreciation and the credit collapses of our current debt-based system without paying a penalty.
You don’t get any of the FCF or earnings for owning equity, if a stock doesn’t pay dividends it’s the same thesis that someone will pay more for it later
Or they will pay dividends later.
That's ok - given central banks' continued love of gold, I have no qualms of there being a buyer in my lifetime and probably my kids'
When equities are priced in gold, they peaked in 1999, and have broadly been downhill since then. For reference, see the price of SPY/XAUUSD.
“Mr Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft sliminess that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat. And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup. But, above all, Mr Bond, I love the power that gold alone gives to its owner — the magic of controlling energy, exacting labour, fulfilling one’s every wish and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds, even souls. Yes, Mr Bond, I have worked all my life for gold and, in return, gold has worked for me and for those enterprises that I have espoused. I ask you,’ Goldfinger gazed earnestly at Bond, ‘is there any other substance on earth that so rewards its owner?’”
Not one mention of the Annunaki anywhere!
I have mentioned this in the past, we are on an "energy" standard as opposed to a "gold" standard and to me, in reality, we have been since the industrial revolution. Just Gold and Currency is a means for people to access energy.
Until recently it was an "Oil Standard". But now we are in transition from Oil to Renewals. I think that transition is causing some if not most of the political issues we are having now.
With renewals, the source is always available and everyone just needs to purchase the means of accessing it once. With Oil, you need to constantly "pay" someone to get that energy, so many people/companies know their gravy train is ending and they are doing all the can to keep us using fossil fuels.
Also there is an on-going struggle on who produces the items needed to access sun and wind power. Right now China is easily winning that struggle.
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Name one thing in the universe which is better than gold? Tip: You can't.
Nothing is better than gold. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Therefore a ham sandwich is better than gold.
the scholastics were right about everything
You’re lost in the desert, with no food or water but only a lump of gold. Everything is fine because nothing in the universe is better than gold.
The movie “The treasure of the Sierra Madras” does a good job of putting gold in it’s place.
Better than being in the desert with no food, no water and no gold.
How much better to get wisdom than gold, to get insight rather than silver!
-- Proverbs 16:16
The fear of GOD is pure, abiding forever; the judgments of GOD are true, righteous altogether, more desirable than gold, than much fine gold; sweeter than honey, than drippings of the comb.
-- Psalms 19
Per gram you can sell printer ink for more.
You have not followed the gold price over the last couple of years... Definitely not true anymore.
A quick search says maybe the last year it was true was in 2003.
If you don't define your domain, "better" is vacuous of meaning, as nothing and everything is "better" than gold.
Diamonds? You can use them in a drill bit.
Depending on the timeframe I think palladium has traded higher per oz at times
Oxygen
Gold is a noble metal and doesn't react with anything.
Oxygen is one of the most ignoble gases, and reacts with almost everything.
Iron. For the purpose of building bridges.
Easy, boobs
Better than gold in what aspect? Good luck trying to move to a different country and bringing all your gold with you without filling out a hell of a lot of forms and risking confidcation for "money laundering". Bitcoin doesn't have this problem
The supply of gold is always inflating. One day we will have asteroid mining of gold and it will be inflated even more. Bitcoin doesn't have this problem.
Nobody will accept your gold for a cup of coffee in day to day life, but restraints and coffee shops will increasingly take your bitcoin over lightning.
Doesn't bitcoin have a big potential problem of someone breaking asymmetric cryptography.
Bitcoin is a protocol which has evolved over time to meet the needs of its users. In the next decade or so, Bitcoin will have a soft fork to deal with the problem of quantum computers.
Even if a state actor manages to break the asymmetric cryptography before then (literally impossible to get enough compute power to do this currently), the users can just fork the blockchain before that happens, fix the bug, and continue on.
Have you tried? Gold is tax free for import and export practically everywhere. At most you need to declare it, and that's it. Customs look at your declaration for one second and waves you by. Same with large amounts of fiat money.
And even if you want to "smuggle" gold, it's not hard either. Nothing is easier.
> One day we will have asteroid mining of gold
Rejoice, that will be the best day in the history of humanity!
Uranium? Tricky to fuel a nuclear reactor with gold.
Hydrocarbons? Everything from making life to providing energy.
Silicon? Making silicon chips.
Oxygen? I like breathing.
Why is everything "wild" and "cooked" and "dead" these days? It seems that every title or text I see has those words. I guess it's the Claudeification of everything.
It's just Gen-Z speak, nothing to do with Claude (other than being a vessel for said speak)
I’m gen-x and used wild in of my my HN comments and it seemed to trigger some responders. I was using as a synonym for unexpected. Next time maybe I’ll use whacky instead.
I like wild, it’s a fun word. No need to change if you don’t want to just on account of some grouches here!
we GenX-ers will be placated by any mention of Oscar the Grouch.
I'm gen-x too (56) and remember wild used heavily in the mid to late 80s. Wild to hear it used so liberally once again!
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Is this an ad for shady "buy gold" investment scams?