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Comment by down | Hacker News Reader

gold industrial use is like 10%, jewelry as just a fancier way to store gold, so 90% of gold is so valuable because is valuable, and for so many years, meaning something can be valuable without intrinsic value, aka bitcoin.

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Non-financial use is the majority of gold demand:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299603/gold-demand-by-se...

Jewelry is definitely not just a fancier way to store gold. How many people do you know that sold their wedding rings when prices spiked?

I don't think intrinsic value is a meaningful term. Gold has been valued for millennia because it is very useful for making pretty things. And the price has been high for a long time because the supply of it is low.

I disagree. Gold is valuable because physical commodities and physical things, like jewelry, etc. tend to track inflation over time. As an investment, gold is terrible. Just look at the chart of gold prices over a long period of time.

>Gold is valuable because physical commodities and physical things, like jewelry, etc. tend to track inflation over time.

I don't know how to read this other than as stating the same thing with different words, i.e. "tracking inflation" is just another way of saying that its valuable.

Well, what I mean is, physical things tend to track inflation. That doesn't make them great investments. I'm not sure it's fair to assume the same properties for bitcoin, but supposing bitcoin is like gold - gold is actually not a great investment.

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