32 million dollar for a 8cm wide porcelain cup

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Skybird

We have been there, and also had tobacco, salt, and many more obscure things (even spam). For some reasons humans left that behind and favoured certain metals. Maybe because it proved to be more practical in everyday life? Or do you want to make a getaway escape run from disaster - with a car full of fragile bottles? That you cannot divide to pay something that is of lesser value?

Sure, if you're in a car running from disaster then you're not exactly going to take bottles with you, but if you're not running and you're suffering from nicotine withdrawal, who knows just what you'd give for a packet of cigarettes?

Somebody said stuff is worth what people are willing to pay for it. Not many are willing to pay much for wine and alcohol, or porcelain (or paintings, statues and the like).

Um...if that is the case then how did this thread come about?

But since very long time, gold and silver is agreed by overwhelming majorities of mankind to be precious, practical and pragmatic. It seems empirical experience have convinced them.

You can't eat gold, or silver. If TSRHTF and you ran into someone holding you up at gunpoint, and you had a gold coin, a $100 bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes...sure, in the early days when there's hope of the cavalry coming to the rescue and the gold coin being worth something, they might take that from you, but later...it'd be the cigarettes or whiskey...or, much more likely, any food or water you had with you.

Some also invets in precious watches. But not only does that - like wine - need very good insider knowledge and cpometence to separa5te the junk from the watches that could preserve vlaue for saome time, but the worth of the watch is gone when you break it. Can't happen with gold and silver: the value is independent from the form you give to it: necklaces, rings, coins, bars, nuggets: unimportant. The material value attributed to it remains to be the same.

Gold and Silver are only worth what society deems them to be worth, likewise with any ore, in a true SHTF scenario, metals like iron and copper would probably be worth more as they would be useful for melting down and making weaponry.

When that Chinaman breaks that cup, its value is gone. Eventually the insurrance helps out then. Not with gold, of course. With paper money...

Gold is just a metal, like paper is just paper. If anything Gold is pretty useless, it's too soft to be made into anything practical. To be honest, this paper money that you're so dead set against, is merely a progression of the financial system from gold, with the key difference in that it is an infinite resource whereas gold is finite. I can understand why that would make you place your faith more on Gold and silver than paper or electronic money, I understand that, but what I don't understand is how you think that if society was broken that Gold would still be worth something in comparison to consumable life items. Admittedly something like whiskey is a luxury consumable item, likewise cigarettes, but in an agrarian society it would be something that would set you apart from the basic needs, a luxury indeed, something that you can share or keep for yourself, to treat yourself. I can see how Gold would factor in a medieval society, after all, it did in medieval times, but only to a set section of society, traders and the like, to the average person trading was in foodstuffs and agriculture.

Ultimately, if the S did HTF hard enough, then Gold would be as useful as a paper note, because as I said earlier, you can't eat Gold.

EDIT: Furthermore, in support of the previous advice in favour of alcohol, in an emergency it can be used as a cleansing fluid, as a method of dulling pain, it can be burnt, and in the absence of water cleansing equipment it is a lot safer to drink than water. Can the same be said of Gold?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Sure, if you're in a car running from disaster then you're not exactly going to take bottles with you, but if you're not running and you're suffering from nicotine withdrawal, who knows just what you'd give for a packet of cigarettes?

Let'S keep it treasonable. Take TSHTF scenarios as one of these: collapse of fincial and then economic system, or collapse of civilisaitonal order due to for example cosmic disaster like meteor strike, or pendemic global disease. Let'S not focu on the single guy in the woods who would sell his survival for that special edition of volume 1 of Asterix comic.

Um...if that is the case then how did this thread come about?

Becasue very few people assembled and drove the price up, while the majority just shakes the head.

You can't eat gold, or silver. If TSRHTF and you ran into someone holding you up at gunpoint, and you had a gold coin, a $100 bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes...sure, in the early days when there's hope of the cavalry coming to the rescue and the gold coin being worth something, they might take that from you, but later...it'd be the cigarettes or whiskey...or, much more likely, any food or water you had with you.

Which is no contradiction at all. I always said gold became an accepted currency because people voluntarily negotiated its value on a market and came to the voluntary agreement to see its value as relatively high, for many purposes that were so convincing (market saturation but also: being rare, pragmatic handling, non-corrosion,. irrelevance of the form the gold comes in, etc), that almost everybody agreed to it, and agreed to give up early tokens like rare seeds, tobacco, furs, seashells, feathers etc in favour of using gold and silver as trading objects.

You are right, one cannot eat gold, but that is totally irrelevant. The argument I would make here is that in case of a civilisational or economic breakdown, gold will lead you much further and can enable you to barter for much longer time into the disaster, than a cup of porcelain, chewing gum, or whatever. If you do not think so, then you argue against over 3000 years of history filled with breakdowns by wars, empire'S falling, economic disaster, hyperinflations.

I would not accept a precious porcelain cup as a trading good in a TSHTF scenario, becasue if it really were so precious, I could not barter it myself that easily without loosing all my wealth in form of that cup, when just wanting to trade a litre of milk, or book a ferry passage over a river. A grain of gold is worth something after all, a grain of porcelain is dirt.

Gold and Silver are only worth what society deems them to be worth, likewise with any ore, in a true SHTF scenario, metals like iron and copper would probably be worth more as they would be useful for melting down and making weaponry.

Yes, its worth what people agree to see in it, in value. And indeed gold has been bartered for copper and iron ore. That'S becasyue money (based on a commodity) is a trading good just like any other. Hasn't this been repeated by me many many times in the past months? But tell me, the formalization of using a metal as an official currency by minting it into coins or bars - have they recently used gold, or iron for it? And why did they made their choice, what do you think?

Gold is just a metal, like paper is just paper. If anything Gold is pretty useless, it's too soft to be made into anything practical. To be honest, this paper money that you're so dead set against, is merely a progression of the financial system from gold, with the key difference in that it is an infinite resource whereas gold is finite. I can understand why that would make you place your faith more on Gold and silver than paper or electronic money, I understand that, but what I don't understand is how you think that if society was broken that Gold would still be worth something in comparison to consumable life items. Admittedly something like whiskey is a luxury consumable item, likewise cigarettes, but in an agrarian society it would be something that would set you apart from the basic needs, a luxury indeed, something that you can share or keep for yourself, to treat yourself. I can see how Gold would factor in a medieval society, after all, it did in medieval times, but only to a set section of society, traders and the like, to the average person trading was in foodstuffs and agriculture.

I am not certain that you correctly understood where the value of gold lies in a disaster scenario. Maybe it comes to your mind when thinking about whether you would be able to barter longer with paper money, or with gold nuggets, rings or coins. With which of the two would you hold out longer? And if you remove the printing on those bits of paper, what are you left with in bartering value then? Compared to a gold coin you melt into a nugget again?

Ultimately, if the S did HTF hard enough, then Gold would be as useful as a paper note, because as I said earlier, you can't eat Gold.

In a non-economic-only scenario, absolutely. Still, gold would be given up later as an accepted trading good for bartering, then paper notes. And if it is for suviving the crash of a fiscal and economic system and preserve the material values you own in form of stockpiled fiscal buying power (savings for example), then the majhority of people is better served and it is more prgmatic for them to focus on changing their values into gold instead of paintings, or little cups. The wide acceptance of gold as a trading item stands beyond dob t, since millenia. The acceptance of this or that painting, sculpture, or procerlain cup at least is in doubt in the long run. Also, if you ruin the canvas or paint, the value is gone. If you melt the ring or necklace, it still has the value of gold attributed to it. And as said several times now, the pragmatic handling of gold is easier than that of sculptures, bottles or porcelain cups.

Twain wrote that famous story about the million pound note. He could as well have written one about a 36 million dollar porcelain cup. You know how the stroy goes, the hero gets all for free because a one million pound note does serve very badly as a currency token. In reality, that hero would find huge difficulties in finding partners for any deal he wants to do regarding his ordinary life. Most people do not have 35,999,98.01 dollars as exchange when you want to pay 1,99 for your coffee.

EDIT: Furthermore, in support of the previous advice in favour of alcohol, in an emergency it can be used as a cleansing fluid, as a method of dulling pain, it can be burnt, and in the absence of water cleansing equipment it is a lot safer to drink than water. Can the same be said of Gold?

And if you are in free fall, you better have a set of wings.
Let's not take exceptions from general rules as the rule itself. If you think in the coming fiscal breakdown you better serve your interest when buying bottles with alcohol instead of gold in any physical form, do it, and see what you hold in your hands still when the show is over. If you think that in a war scenario where you must flee from a terribly murderous enemy or want to escape from a tyrannic police dictatorship and need to bribe border guards or a forger to give you forged papers or let you pass the border, you are better served with a cup or a bottle of alcohol instead of grains or tiny pieces or copins of gold, prepare for that - but do not complain over the disillusionizing outcome. If you think that in case of a scenario of global civilizational collapse where passenger and goods traffic stops, next communication and media, next relations between neighbouring states, next internal orders within these states and interim dictatorship being brought to fall by looting gangs and replaced with tribal structures, if you think that in that scenario you can barter for as long as with porcelain cups or bottles of alcohol, the prepare for it, and we will thzen see if you hold out as long as I do with my nuggets of gold and silver. Not to mention the pragmatic difficulties you run into, and that I explained above.

You have not understand the reasons why gold has been accepted that wildely as a formalised trading token by man since so long time, Oberon. I never said, never, nowhere, that gold has a given intrinsic value dicatted by a higher rwality, in itself, I never said that! I preach since long time that a gold currency is a commodity or good just like any other, which gets its value attriubuted by people in free negotaitons, and if mankind since so long time sees so much value in it, then that has reasonable and pragmatic reasons!

Copmolare that to an iron cpoin minted by the monopolise dstate, which in effect is nothing else but paper money. That thing has no value in itself that people would barter that easily. Melt that iron copin inbto a nugget, and see what yoiu get for that. That coin has its value not negotiated on then market, but it gets dicated by the state who fixes that value, and then devalues it all time long. That is the reason why collectors coins become precious: they get withdrawqwen, somewhat, fromt he state's infleunce tom dictate their value, instead their value is negotiated on the market by free collectors.

In the end, this topic was just about that stories like that Chinese cup are about leaving reasonable borders of pragmatic life when attributing so much buying power to such an unpragmatic and ugly and fragile object. And I am certain that many see it like I do. And that is the reason why tiny porcelain cups will never find the needed acceptance to serve in the function of a formal currency. State-made money made of paper or iron, is no trading good on the market, it has no value in itself that would be traded on the free market, our whole fiscal system is basing on empty bubbles and illusions. Gold-money has such a value, no matter whether minted into coins, or not. Like these facts, disagree with them, it doe snot matter. Melt that one coin back into an iron nugget, and the other into a gold nugget, and see what of the two you can trade on the market, see how far you get. You must not tell me the result, I already know it.

Read my sig (currently the Baader quote).

[Wolferz]

Do you know why that guy bought that cup, Skybird?

Because he can.

As for the SHTF scenario...
It's likely that a loaf of bread will be worth as much as a bag of gold...
Until there's no more bread.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Wolferz

Do you know why that guy bought that cup, Skybird?

Because he can.

Yes.

And did you know why that depressive guy jumped out of the window? Because he could as well. However, that he could does not mean that he was sane.

P.S. You know what I would do if I would, by chance find in the garden some ancient golden gems and necklaces of archaeological interest? I would keep it secret, buy an equipment and would melt it all into nugget or bars, then sell it. Because if the gold is left in the forms they had given to it two thousand years ago, the monopolised criminal called the state claims possession of it, and must not even pay me a finder's fee. So, I must sell it, so to speak, and will never get the value the gold has for sure. If I take away that shape of ancient coins and rings, then the archaeological "value" is gone, and what is left is the value of gold, in full this time!, and that is the reason why I can take it and sell it anywhere in small portions without being asked questions.

[Wolferz]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Yes.

And did you know why that depressive guy jumped out of the window? Because he could as well. However, that he could does not mean that he was sane.

Touche'.

Why am I leaking?

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Wolferz

Touche'.

Why am I leaking?

You forgot to replace your incintinence pad?

Becasue very few people assembled and drove the price up, while the majority just shakes the head.

Did you shake your head when a few people drove the price of gold up?
I did, but I was very very happy they did.
What about that idiot who tried to corner the silver market recently? that was funny.

Which is no contradiction at all. I always said gold became an accepted currency because people voluntarily negotiated its value on a market and came to the voluntary agreement to see its value as relatively high

What on earth makes you think it was voluntary?
Do you somehow think the diamond racket works on a voluntary basis too?
You seem to labour under the illusion that governments and institutions are unable to manipulate markets.
Funnily enough the trade for porcelain played a major role in one of the massive failures of the silver standard.
I would have thought someone who is such a fan of metal standards would be aware of the patterns it produces.
Then again if they was aware of it they wouldn't be such a massive fan would they?

P.S. You know what I would do if I would, by chance find in the garden some ancient golden gems and necklaces of archaeological interest? I would keep it secret, buy an equipment and would melt it all into nugget or bars, then sell it. Because if the gold is left in the forms they had given to it two thousand years ago, the monopolised criminal called the state claims possession of it, and must not even pay me a finder's fee.

Errrrr... if you find some ancient jewelry its yours, however if you find a buried box of jewelry that was hidden you have to sell it to the state at current market value if its original owners and their descendants cannot be traced.

I say: natural law: finders, keepers.

Don't you mean roman law, or later common law? you know the things which set the standard for finding lost things.

[Betonov]

Originally Posted by Skybird

P.S. You know what I would do if I would, by chance find in the garden some ancient golden gems and necklaces of archaeological interest? I would keep it secret, buy an equipment and would melt it all into nugget or bars, then sell it.

DON'T YOU DARE, THAT THING BELONGS IN A MUSEUM

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Betonov

DON'T YOU DARE, THAT THING BELONGS IN A MUSEUM

Says the great monopolised looter and crminal, the state. I say: natural law: finders, keepers. They can get it from me if it is so precious to them. They will need to pay me for it, however, and I will set the price at what it is worth to them, and me. Either a price can be agreed on, or not. The minimum is the material price of the gold, and then plus X.

The only exception is that the previous owner still lives and can be found. Then it is his. But a state never is a legitmised owner of anything. Whatever a state claims to own, it has plundered and stolen and expropriated. Land. claims for what is on the land, and within the ground.

So in the end even archeological findings come down to: property rights again. Anything else is just a mixture of sentimentality and vague dreaming about something one does not wish to define precisely, living by the illusion that the naming a material value of something would devalue its attributed immaterial value, which is a very subjective quality. But you do not and cannot sell the memory you link to and the emotional value you therefore attribute to that gold coin that has been possessed by your family since long, you only can demand price for the material value of the gold and the value the collector attributes to it, for whatever his reasons may be.

[Betonov]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Says the great monopolised looter and crminal, the state.

No, says a person interested in history that sees beauty in the craft of our ancestors, the proof that they were able to manually produce things as accurately as a modern CNC machine, the story behind it and the simple romantic idea that perhaps it belonged to a direct ancestor of mine.

A person like me, that believes that life has a little more to offer than just live until you die.
Now leave artifacts alone because I will not tolerate the destruction of a work of art just because you yourself believe that the only value to an object is the weight of the material.

So no, the state didn't say that, I said it belongs in a museum

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Let'S keep it treasonable. Take TSHTF scenarios as one of these: collapse of fincial and then economic system, or collapse of civilisaitonal order due to for example cosmic disaster like meteor strike, or pendemic global disease. Let'S not focu on the single guy in the woods who would sell his survival for that special edition of volume 1 of Asterix comic.

Hey! Asterix is serious business don't you know?!

Those are more than reasonable scenarios, essentially focusing on the collapse of communications and infrastructure which leads to the collapse of the current economic system and social order. I'll come back to these scenarios later.

Becasue very few people assembled and drove the price up, while
the majority just shakes the head.

I would hesitate to use the term 'very few', indeed Sothebys would also hesitate. Certainly in the current market it's generally accepted that in order to profit from these items you have to be rich already, but equally you can say that for any item which increases in worth over time. After all, there are more than a couple of people out there who have brought a painting from someone who was a nobody, for a cheap price, and then find themselves sitting on a windfall when that same nobody makes it big, and/or dies (a sad fact of life being that an artists work will always increase in value after their demise). Certainly in the grand scheme of things it's a very small number compared to the vast population of the planet, but nevertheless it's not as small as you seem to imply.

Which is no contradiction at all. I always said gold became an accepted currency because people voluntarily negotiated its value on a market and came to the voluntary agreement to see its value as relatively high, for many purposes that were so convincing (market saturation but also: being rare, pragmatic handling, non-corrosion,. irrelevance of the form the gold comes in, etc), that almost everybody agreed to it, and agreed to give up early tokens like rare seeds, tobacco, furs, seashells, feathers etc in favour of using gold and silver as trading objects.

This is true, and eventually that lead to fiat money through the increase in gold in value beyond that which was feasible in usage as an every day form of currency, that and the fact that it's a lot easier to control the value via governmental intervention. Have no fear, I am not about to espouse the merits of fiat currency, particularly since that conversation would end in infractions being handed out. However, you can see a progression from token currency, to gold and silver and then to fiat.

You are right, one cannot eat gold, but that is totally irrelevant. The argument I would make here is that in case of a civilisational or economic breakdown, gold will lead you much further and can enable you to barter for much longer time into the disaster, than a cup of porcelain, chewing gum, or whatever. If you do not think so, then you argue against over 3000 years of history filled with breakdowns by wars, empire'S falling, economic disaster, hyperinflations.

Gold will win through in the end, when civilization recovers, but by that time you'd probably be dead. There might be a time in the immediate aftermath that gold would be worth something in terms of how people remember that it's worth something, but when the cold hard reality of the new existence sets in, then gold will be relatively worthless in comparison to more useful materials such as coal, iron, food, water, medicine and wood. When society has rebuilt itself into a position where it's able to conduct mass trade then gold might come back into its own, but you'd need to sit on your gold until then.

I would not accept a precious porcelain cup as a trading good in a TSHTF scenario, becasue if it really were so precious, I could not barter it myself that easily without loosing all my wealth in form of that cup, when just wanting to trade a litre of milk, or book a ferry passage over a river. A grain of gold is worth something after all, a grain of porcelain is dirt.

A grain of gold is only worth something if a person can use it in turn to gain something else. If a ferryman has no-one around him who will accept gold as payment for goods then he won't accept the gold.

Yes, its worth what people agree to see in it, in value. And indeed gold has been bartered for copper and iron ore. That'S becasyue money (based on a commodity) is a trading good just like any other. Hasn't this been repeated by me many many times in the past months? But tell me, the formalization of using a metal as an official currency by minting it into coins or bars - have they recently used gold, or iron for it? And why did they made their choice, what do you think?

In terms of recent use of metals in coins, I think they use more copper and zinc than they use gold. Of course that's because it's the coin itself is the object of value, not its contents. Naturally if it's made of gold then the contents AND the coin become of value. However, the fact that gold and silver are currently too expensive to actually use in a low denomination coin means that things like copper and zinc are used instead...in fact I think it's been quite a few decades, if not centuries, since gold was used in a coin, the only one I can think of in the UK is the old gold sovereign.

I am not certain that you correctly understood where the value of gold lies in a disaster scenario. Maybe it comes to your mind when thinking about whether you would be able to barter longer with paper money, or with gold nuggets, rings or coins. With which of the two would you hold out longer? And if you remove the printing on those bits of paper, what are you left with in bartering value then? Compared to a gold coin you melt into a nugget again?

It all depends on the worth of the object in the situation. Although the reusability of gold does give it an advantage over paper and composite metal coins, I won't argue that. However, it would need to be a relatively minor disaster in order for gold to not initially lose its value.

In a non-economic-only scenario, absolutely. Still, gold would be given up later as an accepted trading good for bartering, then paper notes.

Indeed, eventually the evolution of finances would begin again, however for someone of our ages, I suspect that this will occur beyond both of our lifetimes. In which case what use is this Gold that we have kept?

And if it is for suviving the crash of a fiscal and economic system and preserve the material values you own in form of stockpiled fiscal buying power (savings for example), then the majhority of people is better served and it is more prgmatic for them to focus on changing their values into gold instead of paintings, or little cups.

Again, it depends on how hard the system would crash. Little cups and paintings perhaps certainly are not as useful as gold, but equally the likes of medicine, food and drink are more useful than gold, and in the aftermath of a SHTF scenario the worth of an object will be based upon how useful it is, not how much it shines or is deemed by society to be worth.

The wide acceptance of gold as a trading item stands beyond dob t, since millenia. The acceptance of this or that painting, sculpture, or procerlain cup at least is in doubt in the long run. Also, if you ruin the canvas or paint, the value is gone. If you melt the ring or necklace, it still has the value of gold attributed to it. And as said several times now, the pragmatic handling of gold is easier than that of sculptures, bottles or porcelain cups.

Oh, certainly, if one were to drink the whiskey, then its worth is gone, until we find a way to extract it from urine then it's a new renewable resource. In a manner of speaking Gold is the same, otherwise it wouldn't be worth much since there is only a finite amount of it on this planet, however the fact that gold can be melted down and reused does give it an immediate advantage over the likes of paintings and other objects, but only within a certain situation.

Twain wrote that famous story about the million pound note. He could as well have written one about a 36 million dollar porcelain cup. You know how the stroy goes, the hero gets all for free because a one million pound note does serve very badly as a currency token. In reality, that hero would find huge difficulties in finding partners for any deal he wants to do regarding his ordinary life. Most people do not have 35,999,98.01 dollars as exchange when you want to pay 1,99 for your coffee.

This is true, which is why the fiat currency acts as an intermedary for the deal, one cannot barter Ming cup with Ming cup (although I would wager that such events have occurred in the past) but equally without the ability to break the gold down to its smallest quantity, you would find yourself in a similar situation if someone gave you a bar of gold. You would need to convert this bar into a grain in order to actually use it to buy a 1,99 coffee, which means you would need to melt it down, which means you would need a furnace capable of over a thousand degrees celsius.

And if you are in free fall, you better have a set of wings.
Let's not take exceptions from general rules as the rule itself. If you think in the coming fiscal breakdown you better serve your interest when buying bottles with alcohol instead of gold in any physical form, do it, and see what you hold in your hands still when the show is over.

Would that I were able to buy either! No, no, in the coming breakdown (TM) I will likely be too dead to buy anything, but death stopped worrying me a long time ago.

If you think that in a war scenario where you must flee from a terribly murderous enemy or want to escape from a tyrannic police dictatorship and need to bribe border guards or a forger to give you forged papers or let you pass the border, you are better served with a cup or a bottle of alcohol instead of grains or tiny pieces or copins of gold, prepare for that - but do not complain over the disillusionizing outcome.

This is a very specific SHTF scenario, and one that runs contrary to the ones described at the top of this page. The worth of the object that you would bribe the guard with will depend entirely on what the guard can use it with.

If you think that in case of a scenario of global civilizational collapse where passenger and goods traffic stops, next communication and media, next relations between neighbouring states, next internal orders within these states and interim dictatorship being brought to fall by looting gangs and replaced with tribal structures, if you think that in that scenario you can barter for as long as with porcelain cups or bottles of alcohol, the prepare for it, and we will thzen see if you hold out as long as I do with my nuggets of gold and silver. Not to mention the pragmatic difficulties you run into, and that I explained above.

Ok, let's run with that. Let's say that infrastructure and communications have collapsed. The first problems that people are going to have is getting food and water. Our water treatment systems will have failed, our food collection systems will also have failed. Crops will rot in sheds as they are harvested but no-one is able to convert them into food because the general populace has lost the knowledge. Mass butcheries will lie empty, devoid of workers to use them, or the electricity to power them. Meat will spoil in the heat without refrigerators to preserve them.
In this aftermath, will come the die-offs, first the elderly, infirm and those who rely on medications, such as diabetes and the like, then those who are unable to adapt to the new situation, and then finally those who the surrounding infrastructure is unable to support. A recent investigation by a Washington think tank, the 'Center for Security Policy' predicted that nine out of ten Americans will die within the first year following an EMP event across the continental US.
During this period, gold will be worthless, absolutely worthless to anyone who is looking to survive. Food, water, and medicine will be worth much much more than even an ingot of gold. If there is any form of trade it will be done via the barter system, not through any form of currency.

You have not understand the reasons why gold has been accepted that wildely as a formalised trading token by man since so long time, Oberon. I never said, never, nowhere, that gold has a given intrinsic value dicatted by a higher rwality, in itself, I never said that! I preach since long time that a gold currency is a commodity or good just like any other, which gets its value attriubuted by people in free negotaitons, and if mankind since so long time sees so much value in it, then that has reasonable and pragmatic reasons!

I'm not arguing with that, I suspect that within fifty to a hundred years after a major SHTF scenario that we will return first to tokens, then gold and then fiat currency. However during those years, that gold will be nothing more than a heavy object to carry around with you. I mean, you could perhaps use it as a weapon to hit someone over the head with it if you had enough of it, but until gold is used as a trading standard once again, which requires a certain level of stability that would be unseen for some time after the die-offs, then your gold is worth a lot less then my whiskey. Admittedly though, once my whiskey is gone, it's gone, although the glass bottle might be useful for bottling water or the like, so there's still some use to be had from it.

Copmolare that to an iron cpoin minted by the monopolise dstate, which in effect is nothing else but paper money. That thing has no value in itself that people would barter that easily. Melt that iron copin inbto a nugget, and see what yoiu get for that. That coin has its value not negotiated on then market, but it gets dicated by the state who fixes that value, and then devalues it all time long. That is the reason why collectors coins become precious: they get withdrawqwen, somewhat, fromt he state's infleunce tom dictate their value, instead their value is negotiated on the market by free collectors.

Indeed, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make.

In the end, this topic was just about that stories like that Chinese cup are about leaving reasonable borders of pragmatic life when attributing so much buying power to such an unpragmatic and ugly and fragile object. And I am certain that many see it like I do. And that is the reason why tiny porcelain cups will never find the needed acceptance to serve in the function of a formal currency. State-made money made of paper or iron, is no trading good on the market, it has no value in itself that would be traded on the free market, our whole fiscal system is basing on empty bubbles and illusions. Gold-money has such a value, no matter whether minted into coins, or not. Like these facts, disagree with them, it doe snot matter. Melt that one coin back into an iron nugget, and the other into a gold nugget, and see what of the two you can trade on the market, see how far you get. You must not tell me the result, I already know it.

I'm not talking about coins though. Although in a post-SHTF situation, one could perhaps melt down those iron coins and create tools for use in the fields, and since iron is a lot more hardy than gold then it would be much more useful.


Skybird, you read books fairly frequently I imagine. Have you read "One Second After" by William Forstchen? If you haven't then I really suggest you give it a go, it's one of the more realistic of the doomsday scenarios I have read, and although it takes place in America, I imagine that the situation could be transplanted into any real country that's bigger than Heligoland.
We both know how far civilization would fall back in the event of an asteroid impact or pandemic, we both know how many would die, and we both probably realise that we would be amongst the casualties. You because, IIRC you are living in an urban area, and me because of health reasons. Both our odds are reduced by these facts, you would likely become one of the 'Golden horde', being forced to loot your way out of the city and having to try to buy your way into a surviving commune by offering yourself as manual labour or a militia member, and I would probably starve to death or commit suicide. Either way, gold is not going to do jack for us.