I was thinking about gold and why it's valuable. I get it, "dollar will collapse, gold is always valuable," but WHY?
And then I was thinking about the ancient civilizations, the ones pre-flood that were most likely highly advanced.. The ones that most likely were able to tap into frequencies, magnetic fields, and had advanced techniques that was lost to man. Techniques that men like Tesla eventually rediscovered, but cabal agents came and told them away (hence Epstein trolling around MIT, but that's a different topic).
I'm wondering if gold was used as a method to tapping into the power sources in the ancient world. Like, it more efficiently stabilized frequencies and made power a constant in the ancient ancient world. Who knows, I'm riffing here.
We know gold has unique properties when compared to the elements, and we know it's already used in electronics, electrical wiring, dentistry, medicine, and radiation shielding. Perhaps the ancient world harvested it as it expanded their power, and then the Flood hit, people lost the technology, but remembered gols: "it's valuable because our forefathers knew it was valuable, and maybe we'll tap into that so let's keep gathering more gold."
Maybe word-of-mouth and generational story telling eventually forgot how to leverage gold for energy, and it became a relic of the past, still valuable, but the inherent reason was lost.
Gold is highly malleable, electrically conductive and corrosion resistant.
That's really it. Gold is valuable because it meets all the requirements to make a good medium of trade. There's nothing magical about it.
It melts at a relatively low temperature and is softer than most metals, so it can easily be worked into coins or jewelry. It has an attractive color and doesn't tarnish. And it's rare enough to be valuable (water isn't good money because it's too common) but common enough to be used as a currency (platinum isn't good money because it's too rare).
Imagining that gold's history of use as money is based on forgotten magical powers instead of obvious and mundane physical characteristics is like stumbling across some hoofprints and saying "wow, unicorns must be real!" instead of just assuming they're from horses.
Gold is also a hard-limited resource. From what we "know", or believe we know -- because cosmic science, like most science, is never settled -- there is only so much gold on the planet we'll ever have.
Even in ancient times, due to the rarity of gold, this conclusion was easily reached. Also, as you say, its ability to be shaped into jewelry and polished to a good sheen made it valuable even then.
That it is electrically conductive and corrosion resistant (does not oxidize as easily as silver or copper) is another use case that will drive up the value, particularly towards scientific endeavors where gold is necessary for those reasons.
Gold will always have value, silver will always have value, and in a modern world, copper will always have value too.
Certain gemstone material will also always be valuable for certain use cases as well.
Rubies are the thing if you're working with high powered lasers
And diamond tip tools make life easier in masonry trades
Not really. They never were. High power came from gasdynamic, chemical, and electric/gaseous lasers. Current high-powered lasers use doped glass filaments. And now we know how to make synthetic rubies.
Silver was valuable in the old days because it doesn't oxidize easily either. It does tarnish, but that is a relatively new problem. Silver tarnishes because of sulfur. Sulfur was not in high enough concentrations until the industrial revolution. Prior to this, gold and silver were correlated with the sun and the moon and were both highly valued because they did not break down over time. They seemed to have mystical powers because of their ability to resist chemical interactions with the natural world.
It is also self-defeating to try to fake. The only metals that have close to the same density are either more rare or more difficult to work.
"has value" and "makes good money" are two very different statements.
Aluminum cans ----- more stable than the US dollar.
While it's true that societal consensus plays a role, the value of gold as money is deeply ingrained for more concrete reasons. It is because gold is the element on the periodic table that best satisfies the requirements of the seven key attributes of money. Attributes of Money
Durability: Gold is highly resistant to corrosion and decay, making it enduring as a store of value.
Divisibility: Gold can be easily divided into smaller units without losing its value, facilitating transactions of varying sizes.
Fungibility: All pure gold is essentially the same, ensuring uniformity and interchangeability.
Portability: Gold's high value-to-weight ratio allows for easy transport and storage of wealth.
Recognizability: Its distinctive appearance and widespread recognition make gold easy to identify.
Limited Supply: Gold's scarcity, mined over millennia, maintains its value over time.
Acceptability: Across cultures and centuries, gold has been universally accepted as a medium of exchange. It's color is unique, and it is resistant to fraud and counterfeiting
This is probably the most perfect post I've seen detailing why gold has so long been used as currency.
Seriously, great post.
Obviously, I never took Economics 101. I'm going to have to go look up the difference between money and currency now.
And it's hard to fake. Fake gold is pretty easy to detect.
hard to fake heavy
Thanks. Gold only has "ornamental" value because society says it does.
Is has great material science value.
Same diamonds.
No --- you can make diamonds now
Well, you can "make" gold too (via neutron bombardment) . It's just astronomically cost prohibitive for the amount you get. :)
I think gold was valuable simply because it looks nice. Look at diamonds, they might be the most common thing in the world, with thousands of caves filled with millions of them, but our minds trick us into thinking they must be rare and valuable simply because of how shiny they are. To the point that many people simply can’t ever believe diamonds are super common.
And then con-artist elites just play along with the trickery of our minds. Gold may be just the same.
I don't think we believe diamonds are rare because they're shiny.
We think they're rare because De Beers and the Oppenheimer family have created a fake "shortage" of them. They simply keep the vast majority of them locked up in vaults.
I once read that if those vaults were opened up to the public, everyone on the planet could be wearing diamonds.
Think Jew-elry
Wonder where they came up with the name?
I doubt the name came from the word "jew".
It's more likely it came from the old French term "Jouel", and that word probably came from the Latin term "jocale".
Then you need to look at the etymology of the word "jew". It begins with old Hebrew "Yehudi" and goes through a couple of different transitions through Greek and Latin where it eventually ends up in Old French as "giu". Then it comes into English as "jew".
Both words went through Old French before we eventually ended up with the English variations. So if the term "jewelry" was going to be named after the word "jew", it would have done so well before it filtered down to modern English.
Sometimes we need to remember that the entire world doesn't speak English, and the English terms for both "jewelry" and "jew" are pretty modern terms for words that have existed in various languages for thousands of years.
Diamonds > De Beers > Nathan Rothschild. It's fake and manipulated.
Diamonds are super common. My old man worked in a quarry and brought home huge ones all the time. Like multiple carots huge. It's the perfectly clear (no inclusions) and pretty colored ones that are rare. The others go into saw blades and such.
Herkimer Diamonds?
I was thinking the same. Diamonds don't come from quarries, they come from mines, and sometimes, are dredged from offshore deposits in S. Africa. Diamonds aren't as rare as the industry tries to portray, but they certainly aren't found in caves by the thousands, etc.