Quote from: knightcoin on February 24, 2014, 11:56:18 PM

Gold have a historical / cultural value ... hence it's like sticker our collective mind...

Yes, but why was/is it valued. That's the question. A tradition starts somewhere and it only endures as far as people don't re-evaluate their priorities. I mean sacrificing lambs was a tradition but then people were like "ok wtf are we doing?"... then people held all kind of erroneous ideas and came the enlightenment... why wasn't the "value" of gold reevaluated as most other things? Even in the early 19th century when platinum was discovered, which had better qualities than gold, why wasn't it crowned as better?

The tradition of love to this "barbarous relic" implies that we still carry barbaric mentality. That defies our intellectual and scientific progression. It defies our economic needs in terms of demand/supply, as the majority of gold is not going for industrial purposes. What is also defied are the discoveries surrounding the new metals of the PGE group which have better qualities. I mean even the ancients understood that iron was better than copper at some stage and used iron instead (the ancient definition of precious metal changed depending their needs). So? Why didn't gold crash when Platinum, for example, came along?

And how does it happen that every single culture values gold? Why is it so universal?

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Maybe it's a good combination of characteristics. Maybe the fact it's so shiny shiny bling bling does the trick, so it's largely a psychological phenomenon. I don't know.

I just know one thing: Gold has been very valuable for 5000 years, and it will be valuable in the future. Gold and silver is the last "money" on earth to lose its value. The only way gold goes is when NOTHING except the goods themselves is excepted anymore for payment (gas for bananas, cabbage for cigaretts). That's really all you need to know.

You see the fundamentals regarding the value of gold are largely unknown yet that is quite irrational. How can you "not know" where its value originates but be certain that it will always be valuable? Faith, in lack of substantial evidence of value, is irrational. The only thing that keeps us going is that "other people have valued it too" as a form of self-validation of our own thought process which is, in itself, irrational due to the lack of proper facts. At the moment one realizes this mass paranoia they should stop and say "wait a minute, wtf are we doing here? this is wrong". But nobody does that. Some of the financial elite hint about the useless barbarous metal that offers nothing (and their logic seems sound but nobody hears them anyway because they are full of BS in so many other areas)...

People can't articulate the fundamentals of gold because they don't know them. Contrary to what the elite bullshiters who want people to stay off the gold (so that they can hoard it for themselves) say, these fundamentals DO exist and they are extremely solid - more solid than most can imagine.

They were put in place before a single culture was established on this planet - ie it wasn't the cultures and the people which valued gold but that gold attracted the people's appreciation as a consequence.

When you go to pan some dirt and see a spec of gold in the pan, you rationally know that this is worthless in terms of $$$ (the spec that is) but your heart's BPM rise instantly, along with your excitement which jumps. It wasn't because your parents instructed you to react that way. It wasn't because your culture instructed you to react that way - the reaction was all yours and, if you analyze it, you'll see that its highly enigmatic. There's like a gravity pull / magnetic pull towards gold that seems to be "hardwired" in humans, irregardless of their upbringing, which in turns creates the gold rush effect.

The knowledge of the fundamentals regarding gold is not widely circulating. You have to ask yourself again, and again and again until you reach the right answer. "WHY IS GOLD VALUABLE?". Don't settle for "I don't know" or "others seem to value it now and historically" as a self-circulating answer. If you want to really know the truth you may have to insist a bit more on it.