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by grahamperich 3070 days ago
Gold is not valuable because you can make jewelry with it. Jewelry is valuable because it's made of gold. Important distinction.
3 comments

I believe you are incorrect and have the causality backwards. Gold has several characteristics that, when combined, make it an ideal material for ancient jewellery and whose properties remain to this day. It can be found in its elemental form and is easy to refine using primitive technology. It is extremely malleable and easy to shape for artistic purposes. It’s ductility makes it easy to draw through a die or pound into leaf so it can be made into chain links or leaf to be applied to another material. It resists tarnish and is non-reactive in the presence of most acids. It is rare compared to most other metals available to pre-industrial societies so it has scarcity value. All of these properties make it better than alternatives for jewellery and for thousands of years gold was valuable because it could be made into appealing jewellery while metals of equal rarity were not hoarded and made into jewellery.
Use of gold for jewellery and other status symbols appears to have occurred independently from its use as currency/bullion though (several centuries prior in the case of Eurasian cultures, entirely independently in the case of the Aztecs who used it as jewellery but found the Spanish desire for bullion rather baffling)
A bunch of dudes with spears in separate parts of the globe found some shiny rock that looked really cool. Then they probably started stabbing each other to fight for who gets to keep it. This phenomenon likely continued on for thousands of years, with gradually less spears involved.