# Has gold ever been worthless? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 19, 2008, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-gold-ever-been-worthless/468646 "2008-10-19T17:37:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 7
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2008, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-gold-ever-been-worthless/468646/7 "2008-10-19T22:27:15Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > Most pre-Columbian societies placed a pretty high value on gold, in particular as an indicator of status for the elite. It was both rare and pretty, so that having a lot of gold jewelry and ornaments showed you were a member of the upper crust. While these societies didn’t really use currency as such, gold could be traded for other valuable commodities - and, if you had a surplus of crops or fish you could enhance your status by trading it for gold. Other kinds of ornaments were also important, such as rare shells, animal teeth and bones, and so forth, but gold may have been the most significant. > > While it is true that Europeans were far greedier for gold - because they _did_ use it as currency - I don’t think it is really accurate to say that native American cultures “placed no special value on it.” While it’s an exaggeration to say they placed no value on it, they didn’t hold it in quite the same high esteem as the Europeans. For example, there were [fishhooks](http://www.hde-inc.com/items/678996/en6store.html) of gold, an application that would be unthinkable to a European. Fishhooks get lost, either when the line breaks, or the fish gets away. Following the Spanish Conquest, the amount of gold extorted from the natives, and later mined, and brought back to Spain amounted to a veritable tsunami of M1 money supply. A long period of significant inflation in Europe [followed](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/611/what-happened-to-all-the-gold-spain-got-from-the-new-world). Evidently it doesn’t matter what your money is made of; if there is too much of it chasing too little merchandise, you get inflation. In remote antiquity, silver was more valuable, perhaps because in pure form it was indeed rarer than gold. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-gold-ever-been-worthless/468646)._