[noxvilleza]

Precious metals (gold/silver) are very expensive given their weight, relatively easy to divide up, and won't significantly go stale or decompose (some oxidation will occur - sure). I'm sure there are other assets that this is also applicable to - it's just the categorical example I remember discussing with my accounting teacher ~19 years ago.

[eru]

> [...] and won't significantly go stale or decompose (some oxidation will occur - sure) [...]

Just to nerd out a bit: You can dissolve gold in some particularly strong acids, but it doesn't really diminish the value of the gold. The effort for getting it back into elemental form is small relative to the price it fetches.

Compare this to eg aluminium, or to make an even starker contrast: wood.

[djtango]

Yes - exactly this. Gold is nature's money. Every other asset wishes it was told but it's gold's chemistry that makes it a good store of value for exactly what you said. The relative cost to purify and reshape/melt etc is cheap wrt its value. Cf Platinum which is much harder

[eru]

Maybe. I wasn't making any comments on suitability as money, only on chemistry.

Historically, gold has been a decent enough base money. But people soon make up notes to stand in for that base money, and those notes (and fiduciary coins!) win in the market. (To explain, fiduciary coins are those that like notes promise to pay the bearer. By themselves, they are not made of valuable material.)

If you don't move your base money around much, and just let it sit in vaults, then the chemical qualities we talked about don't matter all that much.

See eg https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/rise-fall-gold-standard... for some background.

[djtango]

Yes and I was chiming in about how its chemistry is really quite unique which leads to its role in money.

Cu and Ag are far more prone to oxidation.

Its thanks to the relativistic effects that gold is so much more oxidation resistant. But the other adjacent metals are too hard and or too rare. Eg. Pt Ir Pd Rh etc

That coincidence of lustre (which is both pleasing but also a rough way for us to ascertain purity/quality before we had better tools), malleability, oxidation resistance and ease of purification (gold has a relatively low melting temp) all made it a fantastic candidate for storing wealth.

As someone who studied the periodic table I find it very fun to then appreciate how the properties of elements played their role in civilisation

Meanwhile things like diamonds are hard / impossible to subdivide and standardise so things like diamond coins or tokens are impractical

[noxvilleza]

Yeah I was just comparing it to other things that are very expensive (by weight and size) like, saffron, truffles, caviar, printer ink, etc.