this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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I had an ex who couldn't fathom why in a walking dead/fallout scenario I'd personally not choose to trade with gold, but actual useful and tangible goods like food, ammo, salt, skills...
Their whole argument was gold has always been valuable so it'll always be valuable and I was like "the fuck good would gold do me when I'm starving"
And if you have gold, someone with ammo will always find a way to "trade" for it.
Just a question of how fast the ammo goes during the exchange.
Yeah. If anything, a gold coin is too much value in one piece. Like, who are you going to find with enough spare stuff to trade that would actually be worth the equivalent value of an ounce of gold?
I figure that someone with nothing but gold coin would end up with very very expensive food, and with some luck a very expensive gun of some kind.
I would expect that if I had a pile of gold, the first armed person to realize that I have that much gold would immediately shoot me to get the gold. Then the next half-crazed, highly stressed, armed individuals would take them out and the cycle continues.
But the value of gold still relies on a majority of apocalypse survivor's collectively deciding that gold has value. We could just, not.
Or why not bottle caps, shells, cool looking rocks, dry salt, sugar, nutmeg, pickles, ...
Cooper would hold more value than gold, as a metal that can be worked and given practical application with even primitive metallurgy skills. Or silver, with it's antimicrobial properties would still be more valuable than gold.
Unless we're all surviving the apocalypse and still trying to make chips for iPhones, what good is gold?
Gold is a middle man within a trade economy.
Gold is workable, conductive, and non oxidizing. It’s also used for jewelry. So yeah not great for survival but if you’re using copper, gold is similar or better except for its rarity or iron is available and much better
It does rely on people deciding it has value. It's not the people who are still mostly logical who would value gold the highest. That's why I would expect a highly stressed, armed person hopped up on memories of apocalyptic ads to go "ooh, shiny" and instinctively shoot to get at the stockpile of gold.
Modern gold coins range from 1/10 of an oz to an oz. Your point still stands. Even 1/10 of an oz of gold is over $200
Thank you! It has never made sense to me, either. Hoarding gold did make some sense back in the day when you were fleeing a local or regional calamity, or could expect to see a return to relative normalcy in your lifetime. But if global civilization collapses from climate change or similar, gold will have no practical value to a refugee or survivalist.
I have a spice rack that takes up a large portion of my bugout bag. I guarantee that when I start cooking and whip out some Saffron, powdered Sumac Berries, and Turmeric for a rice dish, and people will just want me to stick around and cook for them. Especially since I also have my, my father's, and my grandfathers BSA manuals, each of which has different pictures of various edible plants, herbs, and spices that can be found in the various parts of the world.
That's why there's a thriving bottlecap trade after the apocalypse.
Good thing I want to collect guns.
It's valuable because barter economies aren't real and don't work. All the alternatives you mention are difficult to transport, not fungible, or not scarce, so they won't work as a currency. Either we revert back to gift economies where distribution of goods happens within a community and follows cultural rather than economic rules, or the market settles on a currency for standardized arbitrary transactions between strangers that has the necessary properties of a currency.