FRESH

Hacker News

The weird, wild story of humanity's obsession with gold

34 points by andsoitis

by hackernudes

0 subcomment

https://archive.is/ShyUM
Article is a brief review of the book "The Secret History of Gold" by Dominic Frisby.

by drhagen

2 subcomments

It is interesting that gold was able to retain its value after the industrial revolution. It could have gone the way of aluminum, once twice as valuable as gold, but now used in disposable drink containers. At the time of the alchemists, there was no way to know that some metals were actually distillable from common rocks and others genuinely rare and impossible to manufacture with even quite advanced technology.
EDIT: Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway.

by Schlagbohrer

2 subcomments

I've read elsewhere that one of gold's biggest virtues as a store of value on planet earth is that it isn't so rare as to be useless, but it's rare enough that it functions as currency or high value storage. A goldilocks material for the purpose of wealth transfer and storage.

by clearstack

6 subcomments

Gold has 0 FCF, 0 earnings, 0 dividends. The whole thesis is someone pays more later. At least equities have fundamentals to anchor the price to.

by hmg-ocean

0 subcomment

“Mr Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft sliminess that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat. And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup. But, above all, Mr Bond, I love the power that gold alone gives to its owner — the magic of controlling energy, exacting labour, fulfilling one’s every wish and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds, even souls. Yes, Mr Bond, I have worked all my life for gold and, in return, gold has worked for me and for those enterprises that I have espoused. I ask you,’ Goldfinger gazed earnestly at Bond, ‘is there any other substance on earth that so rewards its owner?’”

by jmclnx

0 subcomment

I have mentioned this in the past, we are on an "energy" standard as opposed to a "gold" standard and to me, in reality, we have been since the industrial revolution. Just Gold and Currency is a means for people to access energy.
Until recently it was an "Oil Standard". But now we are in transition from Oil to Renewals. I think that transition is causing some if not most of the political issues we are having now.
With renewals, the source is always available and everyone just needs to purchase the means of accessing it once. With Oil, you need to constantly "pay" someone to get that energy, so many people/companies know their gravy train is ending and they are doing all the can to keep us using fossil fuels.
Also there is an on-going struggle on who produces the items needed to access sun and wind power. Right now China is easily winning that struggle.

by trippsydrippsy

0 subcomment

by carlosjobim

12 subcomments

by stavros

1 subcomments

Why is everything "wild" and "cooked" and "dead" these days? It seems that every title or text I see has those words. I guess it's the Claudeification of everything.

by sandworm101

0 subcomment