Quote from: BobK71 on September 21, 2015, 02:47:41 AM

Quote from: deisik on September 19, 2015, 12:07:41 AM

Quote from: wxa7115 on September 18, 2015, 09:51:26 PM

Quote from: RealBitcoin on September 08, 2015, 02:36:06 PM

Quote from: deisik on September 06, 2015, 09:08:29 AM

Quote from: RealBitcoin on September 06, 2015, 09:04:02 AM

I think if you really categorize precious metals as money, then I think only silver is a real "precious metal" money.

Gold still suffers from lack of divisibility which is a core property of money. Prices are generally relatively too low for gold, so this makes trade very difficult with standardized gold coins or gold cubes.

So for everyday goods standardized silver coins, cubes or rounds are a better physical "money".

Gresham's Law

I`m not saying gold=silver, because it clearly is not equal.

But at current silver/gold rates, you can see that from a healthy 20:1 ratio the ratio now is over 60.

So just from an investment standpoint, if the precious markets kickoff, you could make a bigger ROI with silver, than with gold.

I agree with RealBitcoin, silver has been the money most widely used throughout history among the 2 precious metals, and about the ROI, that is something that I agree as well, one of the reasons for that is that most uses of gold actually preserve gold (examples, jewelry, coinage, etc) while a significant amount of the industrial uses of silver, destroy it. (or make it very difficult to recover)

Silver is bad money while gold is good money. The bad money drives out the good money from circulation. That's why silver had been more widely used than gold through history. People spent silver but saved gold specie...

I suspect that very few people realize the true meaning of Gresham's Law, and especially as applied to gold and silver. Gresham's Law really says that, *where there is an artificially supported exchange rate between two monies*, the undervalued money will be hoarded, and only the overvalued money will be left in circulation.

Unfortunately, silver got completely excluded from the monetary system since about 1870, and that's why it has been trading at well below its long-term exchange rate against gold. It's a long story, but, essentially, the authorities eventually learned that fixing exchange rates (such fixing, allowing the issuance of paper, being the ultimate source of wealth and power for the very top elites of the modern world) among paper, gold and silver was hard to juggle. They had to eject one of the three. Certainly they wouldn't eject paper, so they chose one of gold and silver.

What this means is that, unless the elites lose control totally, silver will be left out in the cold. Before they lose control, we know they will try (effectively) devaluing paper against gold to lend stability to paper. So gold is good in two scenarios, where silver is good in only one, and we don't know the relative likelihood between the two. (Keep reading the news!)

Gold is also held by the central banks, silver is not. Here is some commentary by FOFOA (he very much likes gold, but does not like silver):

http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2015_06_01_archive.html

FOFOA posted this nice little chart:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sT1SSS5xZe4/VXqqIEMtA7I/AAAAAAAAGwg/NHaxKhV6t1c/s1600/stock_to_flow.jpg

Note that gold has a huge stock:flow ratio.