Yes, the value is much smaller since your power to keep it is smaller. But the amount will also be smaller. And I would say there are still quite a few situations where having something of trade value is better than having nothing.

> there are still quite a few situations where having something of trade value is better than having nothing

I struggle to think of ones where physically-held gold is better than cash. It only happens when your government fails. In that case (e.g. a Communist revolution or civil war) it's easier to kill you and take everything than negotiate. Where it might have had value, e.g. an American holding pounds sterling during the American Revolution, the old money held value. Selling gold to paranoid individuals is so profitable for a reason.

(The only time it may be useful is if you can tell someone about to harm you that you can pay them with something offsite. At that point, however, wired dollars are an easier sell than waiting for a gold shipment that may or may not be accompanied by Marines.)

It's not necessarily negotiating, it's likely fleeing your home country to some other place and having an asset you can easily turn into the local currency wherever you wind up. And at $1,200/oz you can carry/conceal a sizable amount on the "personal money" scale.

Qaddafi paid his mercenaries in gold near the end of his reign.

If we're in the kind of crisis where all fiat money is useless, gold will be useless too. The only kind of thing that will have value are things that help you survive. A crate full of gauze pads and bandaids would be better than a whole stack of gold bullion in that situation.

There is quite a continuum between fiat currency collapsing and the sort of zombie apocalypse you describe.

Fiat currency has become worthless many times in many countries without a total breakdown of civilization to the extent that gold no longer has any value (e.g., Argentina, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Weimar Germany, post-revolution France, ...)

I always imagined that if you were stockpiling large amounts of gold in your home it was more of a survivalist thing than a risk management thing.

You've never been through a country scale crisis.

In a country scale crisis people would be selling all their valuables for fire sale prices to pay for essentials, including gold. A fiat reserve currency, like the Swiss Franc or the Pound would be easier to use, less likely to be stolen and more valuable then gold shavings.

Gold isn't going to save you from a zombie apocalypse, nor can you eat it. It will however transport your wealth from one side of a currency crisis to the other while retaining value - as opposed to plastic notes with arbitrary numbers of zeros printed on them.

There is plenty of physical gold in Germany's vaults: https://www.google.de/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/germany-p...

The same principal applies to states, and that's why they shipped the gold to USA to begin with...to save it from the Russians.

Gold is for when that stuff hits the fan: no one will take your paper money or if they do, you'll need 50lbs of trillion billion dollar bills to buy a loaf of bread. By noon the price will double.

If you're net liquid worth is well into millions, why not have a few hundred gold coins laying around? You might lose money (compared to the stock market returns) but so what. Peace of mind. Never know. All eggs in one basket and all.

What I mean is that it doesn't really matter if the Russians or the Americans have it, at least from a German perspective. Whoever has it has quite some power over Germany. That we might consider US or RU the bad guys is more based on propaganda than on actual facts. Both can be quite bad as well as helpful allys. And both probably have smart enough leadership to use this kind of chip for bargain rather than total exploitation. So it's not like the Russian would have stolen it, it's more like that the cold war might have had a different winner and Germany would be a semi-independent partner as it is now, just to the Russians rather than the Americans.

Gold coins so people can steal them from you in this doomsday scenario? Gold is about as useful as monopoly money when facing a gang of people that will just kill you and take whatever they can.

Still, better to have them than not. Of course you're not going to walk around with 3 kilo gold chains around or tell people how much gold you got.

With gold, you will be the gang.

Only if you can persuade the gang they can't get more gold from killing you than working for you.

To build the gang you must recruit where `new-recruit-power < total-gang-power`. Since to start you are the only gang member, you can only recruit one dude who is 0.75 your strength. Now the gang is 1.75 strength, so you can go after another dude who's really strong, say 1.25. Now your gang has a strength of 3. Eventually you will be able to swallow up whole other gangs.

That is not at all how anything works. What is "gang power"? What factors contribute to it? Manpower, wealth, weaponry, or what?

Trust me it works.

Eventually, hyperinflation causes money to be measured in a logarithmic scale... And it's fun to imagine the value if a dollar falling below the plank length.