Why in a world of barely a billion people was gold used to facilitate trade over other more precious metals like platinum? This must be due to the scarcity of plantium versus the population who's trade it was meant to facilitate?
Surely now in a world of over 6 billion people gold has reached the same ratio's as platinum used to hold. Surely now its time for silver to step up to the block.
The next backed currency will be silver - there must be no doubt?
Full Version: Gold Is Dead - Long Live Silver
QUOTE (humanoid76 @ Jan 24 2008, 08:07 PM) 
Why in a world of barely a billion people was gold used to facilitate trade over other more precious metals like platinum? This must be due to the scarcity of plantium versus the population who's trade it was meant to facilitate?
Surely now in a world of over 6 billion people gold has reached the same ratio's as platinum used to hold. Surely now its time for silver to step up to the block.
The next backed currency will be silver - there must be no doubt?
Surely now in a world of over 6 billion people gold has reached the same ratio's as platinum used to hold. Surely now its time for silver to step up to the block.
The next backed currency will be silver - there must be no doubt?
Platinum has not been used as a trade metal in Europe because its existence has only been known to Europe for about 300 years, while gold has been known of for around 6,000 years (and probably longer).
In addition, how to work platinum has only been known to Europe for approx 140 years IIRC, thus reducing its stampability, its coinablility, and therefore its use as trade money.
So scarcity of platinum was not the reason it was not used, unless one accepts unknown-ness as the same as scarcity. By the time the use of platinum as a precious metal-backing currency was possible, precious metals as currency backing were on their way out, to be replaced by taxation as currency backing.
Contrary to what most precious-metals-as-currency-backers suggest, most currencies are still backed. They are backed by human labour and products, and - in some countries - a mix of human labour and commodities. The mechanism by which the backing is enforced is by taxation, which is used to pay the coupon - the interest - on national bonds (or gilts if issued by Britain). This taxation to pay bonds is what replaced precious metals as currency backing in the first half of the last century.
QUOTE (humanoid76 @ Jan 24 2008, 10:07 PM)
Why in a world of barely a billion people was gold used to facilitate trade over other more precious metals like platinum? This must be due to the scarcity of plantium versus the population who's trade it was meant to facilitate?
Surely now in a world of over 6 billion people gold has reached the same ratio's as platinum used to hold. Surely now its time for silver to step up to the block.
The next backed currency will be silver - there must be no doubt?
Surely now in a world of over 6 billion people gold has reached the same ratio's as platinum used to hold. Surely now its time for silver to step up to the block.
The next backed currency will be silver - there must be no doubt?
you got some reading to do boy, the world currencies will never be backed by silver.
silver is industrial as well as precious, gold is not.
most if not all of the gold ever mined still exists, silver gets thrown away or destroyed because of it's industrial use.
there are more and more industrial uses of silver being discovered all the time.
gold is inate, yet precious - its no1 use is as a currency, 2nd it is jewellery (yet still a store of value)
gold has been a benchmark of or acted as a currency for over 5000 years, it will take a major and i mean phenomenal paradigm shift to change that one significant and major attribute of gold.
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