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by bufferoverflow 474 days ago
If you are at a war where your whole electric grid and internet and SMS are completely down, you have much bigger problems than currency not working.

It means your bank accounts are gone, your credit cards are gone.

And how are you actually going to use gold as currency? Walk into a shop and shave off some gold at the checkout? And how will the store owner authenticate that it's actually gold?

Bullets will be a better currency than gold in that scenario.
3 comments
1659447091 472 days ago
Trading jewelry for goods in desperate times is a thing. Even desperation in current times has examples of this. Pawn shops advertise in large letters that they buy gold.

But I agree, bullets are always a better currency; one of the positives (for people who responsibly enjoy firearms) living where I do is minimal restriction on such things.

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lesuorac 473 days ago
I'm not sure war even needs to be that large for it to be a problem.

Basically unless its like China vs US then you don't need sell BTC to fund the country (even then I don't think you would; but if you never need to sell BTC its pointless).

If China vs US then realistically, China can and probably will cut a lot of the internet traffic between the two. Bitcoin only functions because of the public ledger; if Chinese miners aren't sync'd with non-Chinese miners then you have a double-spend problem and I can't see bitcoin not going to 0 pretty quickly.

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InfiniteTitan 473 days ago
> And how will the store owner authenticate that it's actually gold?

Umm this is a solved problem. Believe it or not gold has been used as currency for thousands of years.

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bufferoverflow 470 days ago
It's not a solved problem. Notice how you didn't actually answer the question of how a random store will authenticate your gold shavings.

Even banks and large jewelers fail to authenticate gold.

https://testyourgold.com/gold-plated-tungsten-in-russian-ban...

https://decrypt.co/34033/chinese-firm-dumps-83-tonnes-of-fak...

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InfiniteTitan 465 days ago
Simply incredible. Used for millennia as currency but not a solved problem to determine what is gold…
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