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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Gold, just gold, is an investment simply because people value it - it's a shiny noble metal that stays "pure", ergo percieved value.

From a resource utility PoV it costs more to source than copper or aluminium which are nearly as conductive - so they win out for electronic and power transmision applications.

There are applications where gold is the clear winner - "forever" circuits and switches that are worth the extra cost to have contacts that never corrode, space tech, etc.

But the reality is that the vast vast majority of gold mined gets turned into bullion and horded (my precious!!) or played with a little and worn as jewellry.

I've been in and around the gold mining industry for decades, I'm not a hater - but it's easily one of the most valuable useless things we spend vast amounts of energy on gathering.

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Being a good store of value, is itself - a value. It's not entirely arbitrary because you need quite a lot of characteristics to make it fit. It needs to be relatively widespread to encourage widespread acceptance of its value (rather than just granting Goldland a defacto king-maker style monopoly on wealth, which nobody beside allies of Goldland would recognize), relatively scarce so you're not requiring hundreds of tons of it to cover even a moderate national level transaction, it needs to be safe to handle, stable, solid at any practical temperature, and somehow relatively easy to verify the authenticity of. I can't really think any other element that fits the bill as nicely as gold.

Put another way, if we look at all the parallel realities of Earth, even prior to the discovery of gold, I suspect the overwhelming majority of them would end up using it as a major store of value. It's just really perfect for it! We may even find alien civilizations, assuming a comparable elemental distribution to Earth, doing the same!

Depends what culture you’re in. Work gold jewelry gives you a lot of social cache in India so it is worn all the time. Additionally it’s used as a mode to transfer wealth across generations with jewelry giving mandated in the cultural milieu.

That's pretty much the point I made,

if you're part of a culture that values gold then gold has percieved value .. otherwise it's not especially useful

(in that other elements have similar properties and are cheaper to bulk source, with few applications that benefit uniquely from gold).

'Useful' being the pragmatic sense, food, shelter, clothing are neccesary, concrete and steel are useful, copper is useful, gold is (mainly) hoarded and shown off.

Gold is somehow universally adored by humans. It’s not just the Indians, different, unconnected civilizations throughout history have given it a vaunted status in their society completely independently. Hence it is pragmatically a good store of value because it taps into a universal, instinctual appreciation for it.

Currently the US government holds 8,134 metric tons of gold in reserves. You can call it "hording" (whatever that means) but clearly someone thinks it's worth keeping half a trillion dollars worth of the country's money in it.

> You can call it "hording" (whatever that means)

Isn't it "hoarding" (acquiring an excessive number of items and storing them in a chaotic manner)?

i would imagine the most powerful democracy in the world would have a better approach to structuring the reserves than "storing them in a chaotic manner"?

Sure...maybe...if you believe that gold is actually there and who knows if it is.

But either way, 1/2 a trillion is just 1/8th of the yearly federal budget. Not sure it is an amount that matters much to the government.

of course, pocket change, probably driven by lunatic sentiments from the centuries past.

Copper is significantly more conductive than gold. Folklore holds a.myth that gold is really good, but basic physics disagrees.

It's not very significant (by most definitions of the word), a typical physics | engineering quote is:

    The electrical conductivity of copper is slightly higher at 5.96 x10^7 S/m than gold which is 4.11×10^7 S/m. More importantly is the lifespan of the two metals. Copper has a high oxidation level. So, if installed in an unstable environment (such as outside), it will fail sooner than gold.

They're close (which is how I misordered the two) with the corrosion Vs non corrosion of copper V. gold being a factor in switch contact lifespans - typically high copper alloys with lower oxidation rates are used.

It is significant enough that you would need a thicker wire for many applications. Gold's corrosive properties are often useful and it conducts well enough, though even then gold is used as much because of "gold" when something else cheaper would work good enough.

Gold-plated connectors don’t oxidize- which is a benefit over copper alone.

Gold does not corrode, and can be formed into thinner parts.

And as an added bonus, copper jewelry turns your skin green!

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