2 Things I Won't Do

People always think "things are coming to a head right now!", even hundreds of years ago. Everyone wants to see things collapse around them in their lifetimes. Gold has no use, it's just shiny. It has the inherent value of a piece of paper with a number printed on it, but people think it's more real, because it's heavy. Who knows why? It's an easy way to fit lots of money into a small space, I guess. So the heavy aspect is more important than you'd think.

Starbuxinvestor: why lunar dragon coin?

Oh, of course. Because those dragon coins' original price were 70+, no one will sell for a loss

Well, one thing about gold it that it requires the death of a star to make new gold. For what ever that is worth.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why people don't think a merchant won't accept gold or silver instead of barter. We sure have a lot of gold or silver coins around that merchants thought were perfectly good.

Here is the thing, if we are talking zombies or whatever fantasy people have, then who cares about any sort of economy. If you are talking about an economic collapse or a governmental collapse then you are going to have to have something to fill the void. Then you are right back where our ancestors were thousands of years ago. I want to barter my apples with some guy a hundred miles over there where they have an iron mine, but his iron is ready in the spring and my apples are ready in the fall and I can't transport them those distances. If only we had some agreed upon, small and easily portable form to represent goods and services. Well, there you have it.

It doesn't take to much to figure out. I have a friend who emigrated from Russia when they were in the middle of their inflationary period in the 1990's and they were having to reissue their currency. They used gold and silver a lot, along with other metals for smaller transactions. They also used foreign currency, U.S. dollars, British Pounds, etc. The simple fact of the matter is that you just don't heard 500 cows across a city to make a large payment.

If you want to wrap your mind around it all you have to do is look up a few modern examples. They were just using commodities as a store of wealth, they were worth roughly the same amount before and after the Russian currency was revalued. I knew a girl from Bosnia and they had a similar time, although it was rougher then were my friend was in Russia. People would shoot up their house and what not. Gold, silver, foreign currency, cans of gas, bread, and unfortunately in some cases women were used as a form of exchange.

In college I had some classes with a girl from East Germany and she said a lot of the same thing was going on while they were having inflation and when the wall came down.

But yeah, people talk about the end of the world as we know it and come up with all these fancy scenarios. Most of them are bad enough that I doubt humanity would survive and so I figure what is the point? There are a lot of arm chair 'survivalists' or what ever you want to call them.

But if it is a standard collapse of a culture or a civilization, that is run of the mill stuff that humanity has been through dozens of times before. Not saying that I want to go though one but if you look at history there never really was a time when there was a power vacuum after a government collapsed. Another government, tribe, mafia, king, city state, church, city council steps in or gets formed and things go on.

Yes and no. The difference is our ancestors were self sufficent. Everyone could and would fend for themselves. That isn't even remotely true today. More people than not think food comes from grovery stores and wouldnt have the first idea how to get it if you couldnt buy it.

Yes there was east Germany and the USSR collapse but it all depends what kind of collapse youre talking about. If you think its just the US than nothing will change much in relatively short time someone would try and colonize it or even states may just form their own countries.

But if youre talking massive world wide collapse money wont do a bit of good for quite sometime. No one will sell food until a new supply of it is established. If you were on a desert island and didnt know when youd get off you wouldnt trade a boar for a cargo ship full of gold unless there were 100s more running around. The initial chaos will have to settle before anything will be sold which may be months or it may be years.

Make no mistake people will be killing each other over a can of soup in such an instance. The reason being only a small percentage of people will actually be able to go into the wild and find more food or grow it. There will be 100 million plus people in the US alone with no means of getting a meal for themselves other than eating what they find.

Modern society has a lot of luxuries and positives, but at the same time it leaves also means absolute chaos in a total collapse.

starbuxinvestor, you are right
when one can barter goods produced why to use gold
but when one party doesn't need that good - the only good will play the "medium of exchange" - gold

then, let's imagine US disappears ... do you think there will not be producers of grain, meat, etc etc?
The path and time it takes for grain to travel from producers to consumers will be longer, but those who have something to trade will trade. Case of Iran knocked off SWIFT system clearly shows that US and all this "TOO BIG TOO..." is just a scary story for infants. Iran still trades ... North Korea is still survives ...

I'm not thinking anyone is fool or smart, me included ... just exchange of ideas and thoughts ... noone can know everything but getting the direction sometimes is very important.

A few points taken from the History of Money on Wikipedia.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money