[rafaelero]

Gold was a currency and a store of wealth for a long time for multiple societies (even when most of those use cases you listed didn't exist). If only they had the knowledge and wisdom of epolanski from 2024 they wouldn't have made this mistake...

[lmm]

Pretty sure that every society that unilaterally adopted gold used it for jewellery first, and only started using it as a currency and store of wealth once its value had already been established.

[rafaelero]

Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity. Gold was introduced to humanity as an ornament, but eventually humans discovered a better use for it.

[epolanski]

> Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity.

That is absolutely FALSE.

Good "money" requires a tiny bit of inflation, otherwise there's no incentive into spending, but hoarding.

When people start hoarding money, rather than spending or investing it, economy starts freezing.

Cryptocurrencies are a living example of that: there is absolutely NO incentive into using them to trade, only to hoard them. Why use them today if price goes up? Non sense. Indeed nobody uses them to trade, ever. There's less people spending Bitcoin for goods today, than there was in 2016 when the amount of people in the sector was a magnitude lower.

In fact, even the narrative on websites like Bitcoin's have long moved from the "currency" to the "store of value" argument.

You're compounding many wrong and false information and building an absolutely distorted idea of how money and finance works.

At the end of the day, that's history repeating itself. As wealthy people accumulate real wealth, poor people chase pieces of paper or ridiculous blockchain hashes.

If you're happy, why stop you.

[rafaelero]

> Good "money" requires a tiny bit of inflation, otherwise there's no incentive into spending, but hoarding.

The only incentive to spending should be your own needs in relation to opportunity costs, not government's mood.

But if you want to give your government that prerogative over your life, feel free to keep using fiat money.

[lmm]

> Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity.

There are all sorts of scarce things that we don't use for jewellery or see as particularly valuable. Gold has physical properties that make it specifically useful for jewellery (easy to work, doesn't tarnish, shiny, etc.).