Topic: The Real Story of Gold - page 5. (Read 6710 times)

The last 20 years (at least) people searched cover in the US dollar in case of a financial meltdown, not in gold. If what you say were true, then in 2008 gold should have surged ("and sky is the limit"), but in reality it collapsed together with stocks...

Gold is good, but it is not liquid

Why would banks bother to manipulate gold prices because the derivatives market is much bigger?  The gold market is worth $20 trillion - there is a hell of a lot of money to be made!  Banks have already been found guilty of fixing LIBOR rates etc. so why would they stop there?

The price of gold could be suppressed to prevent a flight to safety from stocks/shares etc during the current economic climate.

If people are led to believe the price of gold is on a downward trend they are less likely to pull their cash from more risky investments.

The house of cards will fall sooner rather than later and the price of gold will go "to the moon" overnight.

I think it has also been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the price of gold is suppressed through paper games, the price smack down when gold price starts to take off through the dumping of millions of dollars worth of paper gold is becoming laughable.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/a3e3b49d-6d0d-4bfb-b12c-9cd68d597bb2



Only a matter of time until we see a disconnect between "paper gold" prices and real physical gold prices.  I think a lot of people are going to be in for a shock when they realise they paper gold claim has been leveraged 125:1  

As I've shown lately, the gold market cap is minuscule compared to the derivatives market, so does it make any sense for CBs to suppress gold prices? In which way is that beneficial to them, if at all?

I see no reason in doing this

i think any good digital or material its good and yers diamans and gold are rare and precisose like the BTC sometimes soo even dollars euro gold yen etc its all good to have and spend the lower part possible in order to be less nervouse as possible. not like milirtar extremes

Evidently, you're confusing cause and effect. It is the Gold Standard advocates that say that no currency can live long enough unless it is backed up by gold...

And surely not the other way around

Spot on, you deserve a +1 there...

But gold still can be used as a commodity or for storing big wealth, if you can afford the security equipment.

However as a day to day currency as the blood of the economy, it does need bitcoin.

Great read, thank you dude

The price of gold can't be suppressed for too long. It is estimated that only some 60,000 tonnes of extractable gold remains to be mined out, and at the same time, the demand is increasing very sharply year on year. The current rate of extraction (3,300 tonnes per year) is definitely not sustainable, and in 10 years or so, there will not be enough supplies to cover the demand.

Well even if it is true, they can go on to surpress the price forever as long as they want. And since the spread on gold trading whether on buying or selling is high, you will actually lose out the moment trading starts. Plus don't forget they pay zero interest and some banks will actually charge you the maintenance fee for the gold account. Either way you will still lose out.

...

Gold Update: Manitou Springs, CO "turista jewelry shop"

(a real story)

I prices some purportedly 96% pure gold nuggets there yesterday (on vacation).  The one I did the arithmetic for went like this:

1.5 gm (approx. 1/20th of a toz) was for $115.00.    Actual gold value: +/- $40.

Ahh, no thanks!

Gold's physical properties make it a good form of money, no more and no less.

Killing each other over any form of money is fucked up, I agree.  But that is part of the "capitalism" we live under.  Under this system, we have to have economic growth, or the economy implodes.  Since so much money and other financial assets are created and propped up by the authorities rather than a free capital market, if there's not enough real growth to justify the value of the assets, investors will liquidate and we're in for deflation or depression.  So, in thousands of subtle ways, the system nudges everyone to seek profit and economic growth at all cost.

So, we shouldn't be surprised to have so much pollution, unhappiness and conflict.

humans were created by star dust too, and there are a lot of theories which support crazy stories, I believe that we all are a part of a continuous random moment and we are free falling into a doom, and we complicate our lives just with thinking ourselves to be too significant. Nobody is as important as nature, not humans and not gold. Gold is a shiny object which people will kill each other over, and that's fucked up. That's the real story.

I don't know if that's true...  Most of the gold in the universe, I have read, was created in supernovae and/or large stars colliding.

Gold (and platinum, etc.) is truly "star stuff", Supernova Born.

And much of the gold and platinum-group metals sank to the core of the Earth when it was still hot.

It does not have any real story . We humans are making a real story about it!!  

If the public lacks the right awareness, even if bitcoin wins, the elites will do to bitocoin what they did to gold.  It would start with borrowing bitcoins from the public by issuing trusted public debt, evolving into a bitcoin-standard, etc.  If the public has the awareness, any form of leverage will be banned from gold banking where the contractual relationship is storage, not debt.  And banks would compete, and the public would diversify their holdings among banks for safety from criminal conduct.

So the ultimately important thing is not what form money takes, but public awareness.  Without the awareness, we'll never be economically free, no matter what.

The really critical thing is to get the state out of money.  All forms of money would have exchange rates set by the market and sink or swim by their real usefulness.  If you are fighting cancer, you don't spend much time debating which car to get when you cure it.  One car might really be better than another, but it's kind of a minor issue.

Precious metals have been used for thousands of years as a sign of wealth. This has occurred in civilizations that had no known contact with each other over vast distances, separated by oceans. If we ever find intelligent life on another planet, I would not be surprised if they did use, or at some point in past they used precious metals for the same purposes as ourselves.

Cryptos are only as strong as the network. If a natural disaster ever happened, killing a large percent of the worlds population, there is a chance we could enter another "dark age". Past intelligence and skills could be forgotten. Infrastructure could collapse. Electricity and the internet could become a thing of the past, a distant memory of our generations to come. In the first years, basic supplies would be most valued where everything works on a sort of barter system. Eventually though, as society rebuilds itself, a form of currency would be needed. If we can base anything on the past, this currency would once again involve precious metals, you just cant get rid of them.   

Strange why the media keeps trying to force the point to the sheeple that gold is an ancient relic and now worthless yet people in power are buying as quick as they can get their hands on it.

Russia, China are buying it by the tonne.
Countries are now repatriating their gold.
Texas is repatriating their gold from the FED.
Public gold/silver demand has gone through the roof.

I think the powers that be are currently suppressing gold price through paper gold manipulation enabling them to accumulate physical gold at rock bottom prices.

When the time comes the price of physical gold will go parabolic disconnecting from the paper gold price.

E-gold has been tried and failed because it is necessarily centralized. There has to be a vault somewhere to store all the gold and ensure that there is not more "e-gold" out there in circulation than there is gold in the vaults and this necessitates storage fees and employees and creates a central point of failure that must be trusted, the very thing that bitcoin set out to eliminate the need for. E-gold was shut down by the government and really any centralized system such as this will not survive either. The future will be decentralized.

Thank you for your thoughtful replies.  This give-and-take is what makes this forum so valuable and fun.  To lay out my take on the points raised by all your replies:

It may seem as if gold or silver had been associated with paper forever (as that's what our great-great-great-grandfathers and before lived under,) but medieval money were simply gold or silver coins.  Precious metals being fungible, there were few practical problems for these coins to circulate.  (The association with paper was in fact the invasion of state-based money that signaled the beginning of the modern finance-burdened economy.)  If we need to make money electronic for the modern age, Austrian economists have proposed systems like 100 percent reserve banking and totally free banking.  (In effect, having an electronic embodiment of gold or silver without losing the integrity of the system as we have since paper money started in the Dutch Golden Age.)

It's arguable that Bitcoin is a better money than gold and silver.  However, IMO old is good in the world of money, everything else being equal.  The reason is not just natural trust by people.  The money has stood the test of time.  We don't know for sure what problems will come up if Bitcoin scales up -- a couple of things right off the top of my head would be quantum computing defeating cryptography, some unknown security hole, and scalability of the system.

That said, as one reply points out, there's really no reason why two or more monies can't live healthily together, with the market determining the exchange rates among them.  Gold and silver did this for millennia.  But this will be true *only if the state gets out of the way*.  When state paper gets involved, something called Gresham's Law almost ensures that the system becomes unstable.  (This was why countries moved away from bimetallic, ie gold+silver, standards and ended up with gold only.)

I would totally agree with the idea that money is no more than a standard, and that no money really has any significant intrisic value.  In fact, national currencies have a huge advantage in this regard, as their legal status given by the state gives them something almost as good as intrinsic value.  (But, of course, as we have seen, this very advantage is an irresistible invitation to theft-by-over-issuance by the elites, and so always gets eroded away.)

I think Bitcoin and Gold could reinforce each other. A stable numeraire.