Gold is durable because it does not corrode or tarnish and is chemically very stable. Gold can always be used as a currency because its value will never depreciate. It will always maintain its value, which is why people invest in gold, such as through the best rated Gold IRA. Despite the fact that some minerals today are more valuable than gold, nothing beats it in versatility, prestige and aesthetic value. Platinum is much rarer and more expensive than gold, but it has fewer industrial uses.
Also, because it looks like silver to the naked eye, most people still prefer a gold watch to a platinum one. Gold has a long history of being an infallible asset in times of economic uncertainty. It was even the basis of the world's major currencies for half a century, when the “gold standard” was preferred as a way of guaranteeing value. From an investment point of view, in addition to being worth more, gold has always maintained its value in the long term.
When stock markets crash, savvy investors with diversified portfolios rely on their gold reserves to make up for any deficits. However, despite its bright exterior, it's inherently useless. Aside from its limited uses in electronics and dentistry, gold has value in human society only because it is gold and nothing else. This explains why more than 80% of the global annual demand for gold is destined for jewelry and investments and not for industrial use.
We spend most of our time using gold as gold and not as a conductor of electricity or as a substitute for white pearls. The gold standard gave people the assurance that the value of their money did not depend on their country's ability to pay debts, their international position or a thousand other things they didn't understand, but only on their ability to produce gold. One of the most striking things about gold is how incredibly difficult it is to get it (and keep it once you have it) and the different things you must master to get gold. As gold became more entrenched in world currencies, many countries began to back their money with the amount of gold their country could produce.
Gold can stimulate a subjective personal experience, but it can also be objectified if adopted as an exchange system. To get gold you have to be good at war Be able to gather a large human workforce to extract it Mastery of global supply and logistics routes Being able to command the guards who will watch your gold and not steal it from you Have the technical knowledge to get gold out of the ground, which is expensive and cumbersome. Gold is the metal we'll turn to when other forms of currency don't work, which means that gold will always have value in difficult and good times. In the 17th century, many English citizens had homemade mints on which they marked their gold coins with the percentage of pure gold found in them.
Pure gold is highly resistant to aging and tarnishing, so most of the gold from the hominid era still survives today and lives on in your smartphones, computer chips and watches. And that pile of gold is only growing by a few thousand metric tons a year, or 2% of the current global gold stock. During the gold standard era, anyone could go to a bank and exchange paper money for a certain amount of gold.
