You can't eat gold, can't burn it for heat, nor drink it, nor smoke it. I've always wondered in a global Weimar-type scenario what gold would do for you? It will probably help in 5-10 years as things calm down but it's going to be a bumpy ride for a while and shiny pieces of metal aren't going to keep you alive. Why would anyone trade gold for food when their family is hungry, too?

Gold gives you the ability flee and still have some form of wealth people in other countries are willing to accept. No one took weimar marks, no one takes bolivars. They will happily take your gold.

Part of currency's value derives from social consensus that the 'thing' is of value in general to everyone..

'USB C' why you obsessing over a bunch of wires man, who cares...? The value is of the consensus..

The value of facebook is not it's software. It is it's user base.

If you can point me in the direction of a better metal that is as widely accepted across all countries as a store of value, I would be happy to learn about it...

Valuable things are equally valuable when things go south.. a home, jewelry, nice things don't suddenly lose value.. for example, your family may not have enough to eat but a guy next door that has too much food that's going to rot will happily trade with you, because he needs to buy a bunch of stuff from someone and that other guy will probably not take payment in food but may trade it with gold...

You need social consensus of value and there is a very real need to be able to abstract value into 'x' valuable thing. So you can freely buy and sell without having to worry about if the guy will accept/need what you want to give him..

Gold sucks in being able to make precise payments and swings madly in value relative to currency, that's why it's only insurance for things going super south..

I would guess its not total societal collapse but economical collapse. No matter what, humans must interact and commerce will exist. It’s usually in forms of bartering when the financial system is in crisis and physical gold historically, has been the best medium for bartering.

The medium of exchange has to be something everyone, or at least most people, have access to. That's not the case with gold. If the financial system tanked tomorrow, assuming you could still access a brokerage account to trade gold, you'd have an extremely hard time finding enough people that already have gold in order to be paid for things.

No, people would have to converge on something else, something more accessible. The clear choice would be bottle caps.

From an individuals perspective it doesnt matter if other people have it or not. If you have something and others think it is of value, you can trade with them for things you want.. I'm talking about maintaining physical gold.. point is, no matter what people coverge to, you'll still have plenty of 'that' stuff.. it's about stashing value in a place that the govt can't dilute away by making more of the same thing..

You have to get things started though. What would be a good estimate of the #of people that actually own gold in their portfolio, considering most people have a 401k or some other retirement plan? 1%? 5%? How do you get the ball rolling on that? Because the vast majority will have to go about life using some other medium of exchange to get things done. Gold isn't going to get there very easily when there's only a few dozen people in town that have any, and it's in a commodities account that may also be part of the collapsing financial infrastructure.

Hold some physical gold, then you aren't reliant on anyone.

Its like keeping a gun, you hope it never gets used but when you need it, you're glad you have it.

And that group will be even smaller than the group holding it as a commodity, meaning there would be practically no one to trade with as the massive majority of the population has to figure out some alternative. I wouldn't be able to take your gold and be confident that someone else would accept it as payment when I needed to buy something, because maybe they don't have any surplus they can gamble on gold and instead of getting something they directly need in exchange.

Whatever the population rallied around as a medium of exchange would have to be accessible, ubiquitous, and hard to duplicate. Gold hits 1 out of 3, because once the financial system collapses no one without gold will be able to use their inflated $1,000,000 bills to buy it directly, leaving only that tiniest minority with actual gold and a vast majority that can't wait for gold to bootstrap itself into a reasonable medium of exchange.

Want to make sure you can retain your wealth & have it back after we rebuild from a financial collapse? Sure, have some gold. But if you want to to have an immediate ability to acquire things during that collapse, gold won't help. If your heat goes out a month after financial institutions collapse, No HVAC engineer is going to fix your boiler for gold unless they already have enough people giving them food and other services for their work that they can risk taking something in return that doesn't have an immediate use.

I'm not saying gold couldn't be a medium of exchange. Obviously it has in the past. I'm saying that current ownership patterns don't make that practical, especially in the short term, say 1-2 years, after a serious financial collapse.

I agree with you, point is, you don't really care what people converge to eventually, you know you'll be welcome to that party once they decide.

Obviously preparing for food and other necessities should have a separate plan..

PHYS is a physical gold etf run by Sprott (who I trust). Is it also worth holding actual physical gold on premises? Seems like a hassle, and if I can convert PHYS to / from USD, is it worth it?

If we're in a wold where the exchanges are all down, or Canada seizes Sprott's gold, then I'm not sure that having physical gold is going to make my life significantly better.

Well, I didn't know the acronyms you'd mentioned.. I guess it depends on individual preference, but I don't know, I'd probably rather have some nice shiny metal by my side rather than not have it.. gives the future me a few more options..