Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Real Stories" channel.

Back to basics. Money is a medium of exchange for goods and services. Precious metals (like gold, but also silver, platinum and palladium) are useful in that their rarity makes these metal commodities an agreed store of exchange, I.e. value. For example, food (as wheat for example) is a poor exchange medium because it's immediately consumable and is perishable when stored. Gold can be stored for centuries. Also you don't need much gold (a few troy ounces) to buy a house. Every responsible person (and most bankers) want stability in exchange. There are problems though. Most of Earth's gold has already been mined, so the Hubbert curve we reserve for crude oil, also applies to gold. Mining easily recoverable and plentiful gold reached a maximum in 1900-1920. Now gold is becoming expensive to mine because of increasing costs to extract smaller and smaller veins of it from harder rocks at increasing depth (most more easily mined alluvial gold has long been extracted). As a precious commodity it is becoming even more precious. The only way to change the scarcity of gold now is to mine it from asteroids in space.
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