"It turns out then, that the reason gold is precious is precisely that it is so chemically uninteresting."<p>- Rare but not too rare<p>- Easily distinguishable from look-alikes (most other precious minerals look like silver)<p>- Soft enough to form into jewelry<p>- Melts readily into coins / etc<p>- Easy enough to mine<p>- Doesn't tarnish (chemically uninteresting)<p>Saved you a click.<p>Here's your facebook post text:<p>"If you were to collect together every earring, every gold sovereign, the tiny traces gold in every computer chip, every pre-Columbian statuette, every wedding ring and melt it down, it's guesstimated that you'd be left with just one 20-metre cube, or thereabouts."
In Asian families with long histories, it's well known that gold lasts for generations. That alone is reason enough to hold wealth in Gold. They shape it as ornaments and pass it down generations. It's a store of wealth because other dynastic families will forever accept it as payment to pass it on to their own kids.<p>Parallel alternatives are currency, land and historical artefacts.<p>Currency is subject to manipulation (even fractional reserves is a form of manipulation), land can be seized by changing empires and wars and historical artefacts may lose their meaning.<p>So gold it is.<p>One could argue why it's not other metals but I suspect there's an element of glitter to it.
The article leaves out one big factor in why gold is valued. Similar to "why does the dollar have value?" (answer: taxes), a fundamental source of gold price support is that central banks all around the world - by longstanding official policy - horde gold (in metric tonnes) and treat it like a reserve currency/asset.<p>Central banks could change their policies in the future and (e.g.) sell all their gold for bitcoin. If that happens, gold price will go way down and I will look for a 3d-printer that prints with gold filament. :-)
> Gold's relative inertness means you can create an elaborate golden jaguar and be confident that 1,000 years later it can be found in a museum display case in central London, still in pristine condition.<p>This ignores another, more importent manifestation of those physical properties: you can steal something gold and melt it down with negligible loss, rendering it untraceable. For example a lot of the first gold from the americas (mentioned in the article) was simply stripped from temples. Of course this works at the small scale as well.
Really it is the memes behind gold that give it the value and role along with maybe a little evolutionary psychology theory of being attracted to the sight of shinies because they are reminiscent of water.<p>Platinium is rarer than gold, denser, and more applications, and similiarly shiny yet it wound up dumped in the ocean to try to prevent debasing gold by the Spanish soon after discovery of a large cache in Ecuador.<p>History and blindly aping the past isn't a very good reason but it is a strong one.
Some people value gold because it is pretty. And some people value gold because it is useful. And some people value gold because the government can't create new gold out of thin air.<p>Does that about cover it?
Perhaps the question should be, “Why do women value gold?”<p>Using gold for adornment seems universal. And, it seems to be the females in the culture who primarily wear it. Of course, it’s a chicken and egg kinda thing; do women value it (and the men who have it) because it’s valuable, or is it valuable because women like it?<p>I’ve always liked the color of copper more. And, silver seems far more shiny.
However — and this goes back to the gender issue — the men would not normally have the task of polishing the stuff as it oxidizes. In other words, while a copper necklace and a gold necklace might appear equally pretty to a man, perhaps a woman would look at the copper and see not just the color, but the work that will be needed to maintain it.