this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

If there is more gold, it’s value should go down. The price should only go up when supply becomes limited, or some new thing demands more than usual.

You're thinking of Gold as a consumer good, I'm thinking of Gold as a currency which is what traditionally gold has been. Even nowadays very little gold is actually consumed (it's used in small quantities for things like wiring inside a microchip package the pads of the dies to the package pins).

When a cross-currency exchange rate changes all that you know for sure is that the relative value of a currency has changed vs that of a different currency - maybe one currency went up in worth, maybe the other currency went down in worth, maybe both at the same time, maybe both went down at different speeds, maybe both went up at different speeds.

It's exactly because "if there is more gold, it’s value should go down" AND gold has being up in quantity by about 1.2% per year due to mining, that I'm saying that the movement of the cross-currency exchange rate of the GLDUSD pair is more easilly explained by the fall in value of the US Dollar rather than by some greater worth of Gold.

It makes sense that the currency that nowadays is mainly created when banks lend money (as explained in the Bank Of England paper "Money Creation in the Modern Economy") would lose value way faster than the currency that's created when more of it is mined and mining only adds around 1.2% to its amount in human hands per year.

I'm actually saying that Gold is going down in value, it's just that the Dollar, Euro and most other paper currencies are going down in value even faster so the cross-currency exchange rates between Gold and those currencies are such that the same amount of Gold can buy more of those currencies.

Gold has a lot of practical use, but because it’s value is hyper inflated it is almost always more cost effective to use a cheaper material.

Well, you see, you got the consequence right but you didn't go back enough enough in analysing the causal chain to get to the root causes - gold price vs the price of inferior alternatives for many of its uses, such as Copper, is at its root what it is because there is way less Gold in the Earth's crust that we can mine than there is Copper as you can see here (note that the vertical scale is logarithmic).

Copper is between 100,000 and a million times more abundant than Gold.

Per your logic Gold should be at least 100,000x more expensive than Copper, not just 10,000x.

In Human History stuff that is rare and doesn't decay tends to become a store of value - at one point even Aluminum was a store of value because it was rare since the process to extract it from Bauxite handn't been invented yet.

This also means that if suddenly some way to mine way more Gold is found (say, asteroid mining), its price will collapse vs things that don't benefit from it, similarly to what happened to Aluminum when the process to get it from Bauxite was invented.

It's the modern government issued currencies whose tokens are not themselves rare materials (the so-called "paper currencies") or a stated guaranteed IOU for a rare material (such the USD was during the Gold standard when the USD was legally tradable for Gold by the US Government at a fixed rate) that are in Historical terms unusual and very recent (less than a century old). For me it makes sense that any weird movements in the exchange rate between Gold and government issued currencies is more likely explained by issues with these "recent" inventions rather than issues with what was a currency for millenia.

[–] skibidi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

Currencies are arbitrary. Gold has some industrial value, but essentially no utility to own.

Imagine the global economy collapses, and you have 100 tons of gold - what good will it do you?

Currencies have value based on what you can exchange them for - that is why dollars (and euros and all fiat) are valuable. People will give me things I want if I give them some paper. Gold as a currency is the same, but only as long as people value it. Exactly the same as fiat. It being limited only affects the per-unit PRICE assuming some value, it doesn't give it value to begin with.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Again, you stopped your logical analysis before you got to the end of the logical chain.

Gold differs from fiat currencies in that it cannot be inflated away by politicians and central bankers.

That's it.

It's everything as you wrote AND gold's value over the mid and long term isn't really controlled by politicians or central bankers because they can't issue more of it, which they can with fiat currencies - since the end of the Bretton Woods system, Gold in average just putters along losing 1.2% of value a year, not really caring about the quality of politics in any country.

So holding Gold rather than EUR, USD, GBP or so on is really just trying to protect oneself from Economic mismanagement of currencies.

Everything as you wrote applies and anybody thinking that Gold will hold value if society collapses is a fool.

You could do the same protection against political mismanagement in your own native currency by holding your savings in other currencies, but that comes with the extra work of having to track the quality of politics and Economic management in the countries issuing those currencies (as by holding those currencies you're now exposed to the political fuckups there), plus main currencies tend to be highly positivelly correlated during big Economic Crashes (like in 2007 when all main currencies suffered and maybe only the CNY didn't suffer as much), whilst Gold is not and just does its thing.

As it so happens putting my savings in Gold has already done exactly that: when I lived in Britain I put my savings in Gold and then Brexit came and the British Pound crashed 20% and suddenly my Gold would by me 20% more British Pounds. It wasn't really Gold going up in value, just the pound going down. Mind you, my savings in EUR did the same, but that wasn't a major international Crash, were the EUR would suffer as much as the GDP or the USD.

Just like there was no Brexit effect on Gold, there is no Trump Effect on Gold or Realestate Bubble effect - the price of houses in GLD has actually been pretty stable, might even have fallen a little bit.

That's the point of it, nothing else. All the bollocks about Gold replacing fiat currencies and so on is just fanboyism from goldbugs - Gold is just an investment class that has less correlation with the quality of Economic management in the largest nations than the currencies of those nations or anything listed in those currencies (such as stocks or realestate).

[–] SippyCup@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Gold differs from fiat currencies in that it cannot be inflated away by politicians and central bankers.

Citation needed. You'll find that not only can this happen, it has. Arguably this is currently happening. They can't just make more appear, but if that were the only thing driving it's value up, again, it's price over time would go down as we continue to extract more of it than we realistically need.

If you're worried about the collapse of currency, gold is a particularly bizarre investment. If the currency isn't worth anything, you wouldn't buy any of it with your gold. The people with currency aren't going to want gold, they will want things like food, and shelter.

Notably, during the several hyperinflation crises we can point to to study, at no point in any of them did citizens resort to using gold. They bartered with common crap that everyone needed.

That's assuming the worthless paper you have that says you own gold could ever actually be traded for gold in such a situation. Unless you have the physical actual factual gold in your possession, you just have a gold backed currency. Which is doubly worthless in an inflation crisis.

You do at least have the paper right? You don't just own numbers in an app?

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You need a citation for the Physics of the creation of elements in the Periodic Table?!

[–] SippyCup@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

My God, I've seen people bend over backwards to misinterpret a comment before but that's Olympic level avoidance.

Just admit you can't prove your obvious bullshit dude

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