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by hutzlibu 1830 days ago
"Gold has a very little intrinsic value. "

Not really true, the only reason it is not used much more widely in electronic components, despite being superior to copper, is the high price it has, because of its function as value storage.

2 comments

Gold is not superior to copper for everything - incl. the most important one feature: conductivity. Gold (22.14 nΩ⋅m) is, of course, a lot less chemically active which makes it ideal for terminals, contacts, etc. (and mostly as plating agent), however as a sole conductor it's worse than copper (16.78 nΩ⋅m). Gold has worse thermal conductivity as well... and it's a lot heavier.

That being said, it's still a very valuable material for electronics.

Thx, for some reasons I believed it was also superior in conductivity.
One of the most important features gold has is its ductility: it can be made into extremely thin, unbroken wires.
Gold is simply one of the metals in the universe and has different strength and weaknesses depending on the application.

It's not true that gold is naturally superior, in fact Gold is often mixed with other metals to create alloys to overcome certain issues. Pure gold is too soft for most of the practical uses like jewellery for example, so they add copper to it.