411–420 of 515 posts
Certain cultures are known for gifting gold bars at weddings. Professional thieves know this and target the houses of families meeting this demographic. There's been an organized crime syndicate in my part of New Jersey that has been successfully hitting houses. Local detectives do nothing, aren't any help at all.
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> due to long and short positions Those cancel each other. The important number is how it compares to the net amount. I don't think anybody does fractional reserves of commodities.
I dont think that is the case and fractional reserve seems to be the name of the game for some of the ETFs. Would love some numbers regarding the long/shorts if you have them.
That certificate ensures the commodity is mine even if the holder gets bankrupt or some other disaster. Not having it there would be fraud, and my government does go around checking it.
I have a quite strong suspicion that this is universal. But well, I haven't checked this.
Hacker News users are always wrong when it comes to things that matter. This is not going to age well. Going to wait for gold to drop as that's what always happens with HN topics like Bitcoin and Tesla and DropBox and so many others. The next year buy it at half and hold for 10 years seems guaranteed. Funny how Americans who voted Biden in probably still think they have 10% inflation when Inflation is almost 40%. Goi…
The price of a gold piece could be $1000USD or $100USD . But if it buys you a loaf at either point of time, has the gold changed in value?
I have a joke that I believe BTC is going to $1M USD. But my fear is that so is a price of bread.
To explain the joke, I'm suggesting that Bitcoin might hit $1M each, but that it will actually be nearly worthless compared to todays purchasing power (alongside the USD)
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Aluminum is 3rd most abundant element in earth crust. Gold is 75th most abundant. I don't think so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Ear...
Who says anything about Earth's crust? I am talking about space mining. I can see gold crashing in 100 years just like aluminium.
also in the article:
> Diamonds used to be exceedingly rare, until large deposits were discovered in the 1800s in South Africa. The British businessman and colonial government official Cecil Rhodes consolidated all South African diamond mining under the De Beers company, an effective monopoly which later was controlled by the Oppenheimer family. Over the years, De Beers managed to defend this monopoly against challenges from various upstarts, by hoarding diamonds when prices were low and flooding the market to destroy competitors
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In Britain they're called "gold sovereigns", though I've never heard of anyone owning one — only from references in James Bond films and so on. I wasn't aware the nominal value was £1.
The Q suitcase with the 50 gold sovereigns from From Russia With Love , was it? Ironically the plot of Goldfinger relies on something which no longer exists: capital controls. The evil Auric Goldfinger was trying to circumvent British control of the export of money by hiding gold in car panels.
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Cryptocurrencies are inherently bad currencies because of price volatility (except stable coins). That also makes them good speculative assets fwiw
and stablecoins are always fraudulent
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For a year you will be correct. However after a year what is left will start to rebuild, and gold works better than beans (remember the cans are all eaten by now - we are talking beans someone actually grew). The problem with beans is they spoil (even carefully stored): eventually someone says "I have all the beans I need now, but I still want to sell my shoes". Using something like gold as an agreed medium of exchan…
Or instead of gold they can just trade the empty cans and if you happen to have enough of a functioning society they can also just trade on debt (see Tallysticks [1]). Investing in gold as a hedge for the collapse of society is imo a really piss-poor idea. Either invest in stuff you can use (i.e. food) or stuff that will be demand (Ham radios, firearms). Gold is just not going to be the future medium of currency ther…
Ham radio is only useful if you can power it and find someone else with one who can also power it, my guess not enough people will have them to be useful. firearms are only useful if you have ammo - while you can make bullets and black power it is hard to say if it is worth it. I doubt there will be much firearm trade unless there is an ammo manufacturing (no longer society collapse - though a much more likely scenereo) - people who have ammo will keep the guns that go with it.
I'm not disagreeing that there are plenty of things other than gold to hold onto. However gold is still a reasonable choice for post disaster trade for the same reasons society settled on it in the first place. (note that society also used copper and silver for trade)
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Well you can sell the stock and convert it into dollars and then use those. That's something I can do easily today if I wanted regardless of the country I'm in so long as I have the Internet and an ATM. Gold you can't travel with (weight and loss due to theft and also probably actually illegal) and is also not accessible, and Bitcoin you can't buy a coffee with. Other available crypto currencies just do worse jobs th…
> That's something I can do easily today if I wanted regardless of the country I'm in so long as I have the Internet and an ATM. That's not the case for most people in most countries. There are billions of people who are not even able to open a bank account, let alone a US stock brokerage account. Bitcoin and gold are way more accessible to the average person. I agree that every instrument has a different set of trad…
Your bank knows you, perhaps for many years. Then you move country, or lose your phone, and suddenly they have forgotten you, and you face an uphill nightmare to retain your old accounts.
A share certificate should be a bearer asset, but it is not accepted anywhere outside the original jurisdiction (e.g. EEA for UK/European shares).
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I’m not sure an economist (a mainstream economist) would really care that much about an individual holding gold. Maybe there’s an interesting behavioral question about why people become so paranoid about the value of the dollar when it’s proven to be so incredibly stable (yes, even with the recent spike in inflation—it’s nothing close to hyperinflation). But people going to Costco and buying gold doesn’t have an effe…
> why people become so paranoid about the value of the dollar when it’s proven to be so incredibly stable Every fiat currency that ever existed collapsed at some point. > Gold is not money. It’s never going to be money again. So why care? Gold survived all of them. It’s still being used as a financial instrument, after thousands of years, countless wars, changes of government, complete societal collapse and reorganiz…
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I notice this when travelling the world and it's one of the main reasons I think the many of the arguments for cryptocurrency are flawed. I've used decades old dollar bills in SE Asia that have been pretty much detached from the US economy for decades and have held value better than bitcoin ever has. The value of the dollar is linked not just to the US economy but also a global black economy and that has some unoffic…
This will be true right up until the point it is not. The US dollar dominance is not a feature of the universe, it's a social agreement that, like any such agreement, will eventually come undone.