On Thursday 04 December 2008 09:48:06 pm Andy Bradford wrote: > Thus said Michael Torrie on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:54:42 MST: > > Besides all that, what makes gold valuable? If gold is just sitting in > > a bank somewhere, it's doing no one any good. Arguably the industrial > > uses of gold are far more valuable to an economy than if gold just sat > > around and rusted, propping up some currency. > > One other point. Gold is better as a money because it is more scarce.
I disagree. I think silver is better as a money than gold for precisely the same reason--it is far less scarse than gold. The scarcer a currency is, the easier it is to monopolise which reduces it's utility as a currency and causes poverty. > That's why silver is used more in industrial uses than gold is. What??? The industrial use of any substance is based far more upon the physical properties of matter than the supply. I propone that there are simply more uses for chemical compounds composed of silver atoms than gold, not simply because silver is far more abundant. eg, silver nitrite can't be made with gold... If some new popular doohicky technology came out that required some gold compound, and it was in high enough demand, we'd use more gold. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
