This question came to mind after hearing of all the gold miners trapped and how many die each year especially in China & S. Africa.
I mean what does Gold do apart from sitting in a bank vault somewhere.
Its a rare metal ok, and is only used for jewelery, teeth crowns and in some electronic circuitry. There is no major important use for it at all apart from enabling its owner to have loads of money.
When you think about it its rather silly, and sad that people die mining for it. The mines in S.Africa are 4 KM deep, the deepest mines in the world talk about desperation, but. IS it worth it?
Gold is a very stable place to invest money...it is essentially the reserve of almost every country in the world and is used a stable back up to avoid massive economic collapse
the reason is gold is highly stable elementally...almost all of the 146,000 tonnes it it ever mined still exists today
the total gold held in central banks is about $3,500,000,000,000 which is about 1% of total global capitalization value
Yep Gold is worth lots of money in a financial sense thats obvious, but what Iīm trying to say is that you canīt do much with it. Its worth in a practical way is Null unless some rich folk like shiny metal and give you money for it.
So the worlds economy is build on some shiny metal which is practically useless apart from its beauty. That just shows what a messed up world we live in IMO.
Important things like food or water has little value, except to those who are dieing of starvation I suppose.
gold is a far better conductor than copper in that it doesn't corrode. so its hardy worthless.
anyway, the world market needs a standard. since gold holds the most value and yet is easily storable and lasts pretty much forever, it is the most practical. in fact what you seem to imply is that the world market should be based on consumable items like food, which is ludicrous.
meh this is a silly topic with no point. its terrible that some people in the world are practically slaved in order to mine gold. i hardy see this as the fault of the world market standard, but more the fault of poor/no labor rights and safety regulations in certain countries.
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Last edited by Schecter on Oct 6th, 2007 at 06:25 PM
I get what he's saying. Its almost like we are a bunch of cavemen, worshipping the shinny stone. Its all socially accepted anywhere that people want gold, how did that happen? Who knows.
Yes but the question is, what the hell caused our fascination with it in the first place? Obviously its not a current thing, but it seems like its a trend that has lasted for thousands of years or more. I understand that we can't just print money and say, "Alright this piece of paper is worth this much!" because every currency needs some sort of universal worth to back it up. Its just surprising that universally, gold is still the standard.
Here's another question: Why spend $600 on an iPhone?
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Oct 5th, 2007 06:50 PM
