tmosley
Member
- Joined
- Jan 9, 2008
- Messages
- 5,519
No, gold is only desired and demanded in a country that can use it.
Which is only every country that has ever existed ever.
People who need food right away can't afford to wait until he can walk 100 miles to get food in exchange, gold is worthless to him.
That's sort of like saying that oil doesn't have energy in it unless you have an engine. The gold has value, even if it is far away. Just because someone isn't strong enough to get a hold of it doesn't take away from the fact that that gold has intrinsic value, just like oil has intrinsic energy. It's location doesn't matter. If you have it, but don't have an engine to burn it in, it still has energy inside it. You could even trade it to someone with an engine for some gold, if you wanted to.
The economy is the "economic engine" that "burns" gold, without people, gold is just a store of value, just like oil is a store of energy. If someone hits a new source of oil and floods the market, the price of oil goes down, but the amount of energy contained within each unit of oil does not change. It is much the same with gold, except that gold is even more interesting, since it isn't used up during value extraction. It can continue to be traded time and again. If you have gold, then you have value.
not everybody in this world knows what gold is.
Sure, and not everyone in the world knows what oil is, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have energy in it. As an aside, though, I would say that yes, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD knows what gold is, or at least a large enough proportion (ie discounting the mentally deficient and very young children) know what it is, and will gladly trade goods and services in exchange for gold.