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Comment by easilyBored | Hacker News Reader

The same principal applies to states, and that's why they shipped the gold to USA to begin with...to save it from the Russians.

Gold is for when that stuff hits the fan: no one will take your paper money or if they do, you'll need 50lbs of trillion billion dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. By noon the price will double.

If you're net liquid worth is well into millions, why not have a few hundred gold coins laying around? You might lose money (compared to the stock market returns) but so what. Peace of mind. Never know. All eggs in one basket and all.

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What I mean is that it doesn't really matter if the Russians or the Americans have it, at least from a German perspective. Whoever has it has quite some power over Germany. That we might consider US or RU the bad guys is more based on propaganda than on actual facts. Both can be quite bad as well as helpful allys. And both probably have smart enough leadership to use this kind of chip for bargain rather than total exploitation. So it's not like the Russian would have stolen it, it's more like that the cold war might have had a different winner and Germany would be a semi-independent partner as it is now, just to the Russians rather than the Americans.

Gold coins so people can steal them from you in this doomsday scenario? Gold is about as useful as monopoly money when facing a gang of people that will just kill you and take whatever they can.

Still, better to have them than not. Of course you're not going to walk around with 3 kilo gold chains around or tell people how much gold you got.

With gold, you will be the gang.

Only if you can persuade the gang they can't get more gold from killing you than working for you.

To build the gang you must recruit where `new-recruit-power < total-gang-power`. Since to start you are the only gang member, you can only recruit one dude who is 0.75 your strength. Now the gang is 1.75 strength, so you can go after another dude who's really strong, say 1.25. Now your gang has a strength of 3. Eventually you will be able to swallow up whole other gangs.

That is not at all how anything works. What is "gang power"? What factors contribute to it? Manpower, wealth, weaponry, or what?

Trust me it works.

Eventually, hyperinflation causes money to be measured in a logarithmic scale... And it's fun to imagine the value if a dollar falling below the plank length.

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