What now?
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What now?
Gold is a fiat currency. Gold lets people know you did some level of labor, worth some amount of food, which you can pass around like a betting chip. It has no inherent value to almost anyone, unless you're into large electronics manufacturing. Things can have inflation related to gold, or recession. A gold coin could buy a bushel of wheat back when, but now, only half a bushel, due to bad harvest, in example. The gold has no value to the farmer, it is only symbolic of works performed in the past. And the "true" value of the gold is basically determined by the nobility or governing body.
Ass, gas, and grass: Those aren't fiat currencies. Real things that people directly wish to obtain, and trade for. If people say gold has no value, then gold has no value. But if people say food has no value, they starve to death and are removed from the system.
Money needs to be stable. In order to be stable, it needs to meet these 7 characteristics.
(1) It must be durable, which is why we don’t use wheat or corn, or rice.
(2) It must be divisible, which is why we don’t use artwork.
(3) It must be convenient, which is why we don’t use lead or copper.
(4) It must be consistent, which is why we don’t use real estate.
(5) It must possess value in itself, which is why we don’t use paper.
(6) It must be limited in the quantity that is available, which is why we don’t use aluminum or iron.
(7) It should have a long history of acceptance, which is why we don’t use molybdenum or rhodium.
Only GOLD and SILVER fit all seven characteristics.
EVERYTHING else is inferior which makes them credit. They are essentially Gold substitutes.
If you had a race to see who was the fastest man in the world there can only be one winner and ONLY ONE person can hold the label of the fastest man in the world. It doesn't mean that the rest are slow it just means that they are not the fastest.
Value is ultimately determined by the person holding the money. "He who has the Gold makes the rules."
There is literally an asteroid (near enough that NASA has a trip planned) with enough gold to make everyone on earth a billionaire, so not really all that scarce. Thus not really money by your definition.
Is it here?
No?
Then it's rare.
Cool!
Want to buy a bridge? We are going to start construction on it any day now. I'll need actual gold though. You will have plenty when your asteroid gets here.
Wanna know a real post-collapse gold standard currency? Antibiotics.
They're currently strictly controlled so very few have any personal stockpile, difficult to make, have life-or-death value, and stored correctly have a real world self-life far longer than the already generous use by dates, making them far less perishable than food.
Even just NyQuil would have significant value, and follows all that nonsense chart the other person posted. But NyQuil falls under "grass" in the big rhyming three: Drugs. Antibiotics do too, in their own way. But there is a difference between preparing for a recession, preparing for a depression, and preparing for a collapse.
Yeah, very different, I get it. The ass, gas, and grass paradigm definitely seems like a post-collapse one, hence the collapse specific suggestion.
Heh, though I didn't know grass was supposed to cover drugs, I figured it was an obscure way of making food rhyme with gas.