Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. Gold is less useful than most people think: > In a 2012 paper entitled "The Golden Dilemma",[1] Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examined some common assumptions about gold. First they looked at gold as an inflation hedge, analyzing gold returns from 1975 (the year the U.S. came off of the gold standard…
Silver is quite useful as wire. It's a better conductor than copper, but because of cost is only used rarely. It was used in WW2 for making magnets for uranium processing.
> But copper—used in shell casings—was a high-priority commodity during the war. So Marshall and Nichols struck on the idea of using silver as a substitute. Congress had authorized the use of up to 86,000 tons of Treasury Department silver for defense purposes.
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> Nichols met with Undersecretary of the Treasury Daniel Bell on August 3, 1942, to inquire about borrowing 6,000 tons of silver from Treasury vaults. In his memoirs, Nichols relates that Bell indignantly informed him that the Treasury’s unit of measure was the troy ounce—though not all present at that meeting recall any unpleasantness.
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> Scrap recovery and cleanup operations were so successful that over the course of processing, more than 1.5 million pounds of silver were collected and returned to Treasury, much of it likely originating from earlier and unrelated silver processing. That more than offset a much smaller amount—11,000 pounds—of borrowed Treasury silver that was unaccounted for.
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> The busbars were massive conductors about a foot square that carried current to the magnet coils. During their manufacture, armed guards again stood by, this time with pieces of paper positioned to catch drill dust as workmen bored holes in pieces of silver in preparation for fastening them together.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vaul...