What’s most distressing is that some people with that mindset actually seem to want a collapse to happen. They’ve bought into the gold/silver nonsense and hope for a catastrophe so they can come out ahead of everyone else.
There’s also the “extremes only” mentality. Things either go one way or the exact opposite with no consideration of the vast range of intermediate possibilities. And of course a large part of this mentality is that of the two extremes, one is stupid and therefore the other is the only possibility.
Like I said, if the Reichsmark survived WWII, what sort of event would have to happen to cause a currency collapse in the US where that event itself isn’t the overwhelming factor in loss of faith in our economy?
It’s almost like there’s some sort of middle being excluded.
I don’t really understand your complaint. Do you have some sort of problem with the fact that value is assigned subjectively by whoever is doing the valuation, and thus rather obviously can’t possibly be inherent? The closest one can get would be to have an authority providing a universally accepted valuation, but 1) that still isn’t inherent, and 2) the premise of the OP is that all such authorities have been eaten by zombies so they can’t assign value to fiat currencies anymore.
When our lovely OP hinges arguments on the assumption that silver has an inherent value (a high one, that is stable despite all evidence), pointing out that interent values don’t even exist isn’t just semantics - it’s encouraging him to recognize that by actual valuation methods, silver and gold are not magically immune to devaluation, and that people will not be magically compelled to give him a good rate of exchange of their valuable food for his ‘valuable’ shiny rocks.
“Intrinsic worth.” “Inherent worth.” Does an iPhone have inherent worth? If you want to avoid these ambiguous terms, then we’re in agreement.
Things we might buy today — paper dollars, silver, iPhones, lead bullets — will have some value in the year 2050, e.g. as measured by how much food or house rent one can trade them for. All we’re doing in this thread is guesstimating what those trading values will be. No need for emotion.
The paper dollar/silver ratio is now $17. My guess is that >$170 in 2050 is more likely than <$1.70. Obviously I might be wrong.
Yes obviously you don’t need equal amounts of cash and total economic value but you’re talking about having roughly a quarter of the economy in cash today and then trying to go to a world where there is ~60 billion total in the world out of a 80,683 billion economy or roughly 0.01% of the total economy. It would require a constriction of the world wide economy down to 240 billion.
There is no way for that to be a functional economy. Even if all of the silver in the world was in the US we would have to shrink the economy by 98% to make it viable. There is so little silver in the world that it couldn’t even keep the US going. If half of the gold in the world was added to the silver then the US could maintain its current economy while the rest of the world cratered.
Scarcity doesn’t help the OP is just makes it so there is no way for his senario to work without a mad max senario. Think of it a required decrease in the world wide economy of 2/3 before the gold/silver standard becomes viable. That’s why bullets are more valuable.
Paper money is very convenient — Remember the ancient Chinese? Electronic money is even more convenient. Such money may or may not be explicitly “backed,” e.g. by precious metals.
A “currency collapse” does NOT mean that paper money is no longer used on the planet. The German Papiermark collapsed almost a hundred years ago, but Germany is still using paper money!
Similarly, IF the U.S. Dollar collapses, the U.S. will still probably use some sort of paper or electronic money. E-Coin? The New_Dollar? Chinese Yuan?
The explicit scenario in the OP is one where things have gone so badly to shit that fiat currency is no longer considered to have any value whatsoever. This has implications about the valuation of other things as well.
One implication, it must be said, is that silver will be rated at >$170, because it is > any dollar amount because the dollars are worth nothing at all and the silver at least works as a pretty paperweight. (Of course paper money works as toilet paper, making it infinitely more valuable, but we can assume that the fiat money is in a credit balance or something and truly has no physical worth.)
The other implication, which matters a bit, is that things have gone quite badly to shit. That means that the commodities market is likely to have run into problems, possibly related to the building having been bombed into rubble. Now, your average lunatic* prepper imagines that suddenly people are going to decide that gold and silver coins are the currency of the day and that that dude waving the shiny metal discs should be given, like, all the things. In reality, of course, any event that renders dollars valueless will erase any standard understanding of the value of gold and silver too. Sure, people will still think it’s valuable, mostly out of habit, but they won’t really know how valuable. And when you walk up waving your coins and offering to trade them for some of their finite and non-replenishable supply of beans, bullets, toilet paper, they’re going to suddenly decide that that gold isn’t quite as valuable as you think it is.
Now, once the bombing stops and the zombies are beaten back and the millennials are convinced to sign up for cable TV again, people are going to look around and try and pick something to be a medium of exchange. And the goldbugs will jump up and say, “We have all these gold bars that we could melt down and make coins out of! Let’s do it - it’ll make me the richest man in the world instantly!” And everyone else will look at them, then look around at the millions of paper dollars that everyone has lying around with amounts already printed on them, and the newly-coalesced government will make a decision.
- the sane preppers have stockpiles of food, guns, toilet paper, and such, not piles of gold. The saner ones also have farms. The sanest ones also have bank accounts full of fiat currency.
What weight of silver is needed to buy a new nuclear submarine? Who will haul the truckloads of coins or ingots?
It looks like the Navy’s new subs cost about 10 billion a piece so you’ll need 18,000 tons for a sub or about 12% of the world’s silver.
I don’t think it’s an unclear concept. Intrinsic worth means you want that item for some quality present within that item.
The point has been made in this thread. Some goods have intrinsic worth like food or water or comic books; they’re things that you personally want to use.
Other goods like gold or silver or currency have negligible intrinsic worth. Their value is that you can trade them for the goods that you actually want to have.
Trade goods - like gold and silver and money - are only valuable if you still have a functioning economy and society where some people are producing excess goods and are willing to sell them. In a serious collapse, nobody is going to trade you something useful like food for something useless like gold.
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So the silver standard helps preserve world peace!
Gold and silver have intrinsic value because they have inherent properties that make them very desirable. They have uses outside of being mediums of exchange. They were desired as luxury commodities long before they became money. There are many things you can do with gold and silver, besides exchange something for it. I guarantee you the value of gold and silver will never go to zero. Can we say the same thing about fiat currencies?
The “thinking” in this thread has gone so far off the rails, that I’m afraid I’ll give up. In desperation I reminded posters of something I would have thought they already knew: Germany still uses paper money despite that they suffered a currency collapse. Let me try again in a larger font:
AFTER this gentle reminder, we stiull have to put up with:
I think I’ll give up now. If nobody bothers to pick up the standard then Let Ignorance Reign! 
There are many things you can do with all sorts of substances; that doesn’t make them all equally valuable, or even inherently valuable. You can do a lot more with steel than you can with silver, to name one example: there is some fabulous cut-steel jewelry, and you can make buildings out of it, and weapons and vehicles and all manner of functional objects. Do you foresee a time when steel is more valuable than silver? Why or why not?
No, you can’t guarantee that the value of silver will never go to zero. (If you want to get biblical, check out Ezekiel 7:19.) More importantly, the value doesn’t have to go all the way to zero; all it has to do is fall below the value of other more desirable goods. You can’t eat silver, and from that it follows that if food is particularly scarce, it will be more desirable to have food than to have silver, and the value of silver will fall.
Sure, why not?
As for this repeated “go to zero” nonsense: For the third time now: Look at the Reichsmark surviving WWII and only being replaced in 1948 when East and West Germany decided they wanted their own separate currency. In the West, very favorable exchange rates were given. From Wikipedia:
“The Deutsche Mark was officially introduced on Sunday, June 20, 1948 by Ludwig Erhard. The old Reichsmark and Rentenmark were exchanged for the new currency at a rate of DM 1 = RM 1 for the essential currency such as wages, payment of rents etc., and DM 1 = RM 10 for the remainder in private non-bank credit balances, with half frozen.[clarification needed] Large amounts were exchanged for RM 10 to 65 Pfennig. In addition, each person received a per capita allowance of DM 60 in two parts, the first being DM 40 and the second DM 20.[6]”
After that, Deutsche Marks became one of the most reliable currencies in the world which made the value of the Euro rock solid when those replaced DMs.
Even at a rate of 10 to .65 RMs for DMs, that tells you that RMs never came close to going to “zero”.
Is any of this sinking in???
You are thinking only in terms of extremes. Reality is not extreme based.
Note that a lot of your “intrinsic worth” arguments also apply to diamonds (for example). Diamonds have practical uses. (I do not consider luxury goods to be useful in a “collapse” scenario.) But try buying a bunch of diamonds today at DeBeers’ crazy rates and then see what you get for them if things go to pot. (Even reselling diamonds now results in a big loss.)
How would ordinary people know the quality, etc., of your diamonds?
And the same thing applies to silver and gold. For bulk pieces (like the previously mentioned chain links), very few people will know if they are real gold or gold plated or whatever. It’s even worse with silver since it’s easy to make shiny stuff like that.
That leaves things like silver/gold coins and such which can still be faked. The smallest gold coin in wide circulation that people would recognize is the Krugerrand. 1oz of gold. If the Mad Max fantasy world you’re thinking of, how many people are going to have $1400 worth of stuff like food, medicine, ammo that they’re willing to trade you for one of those???
Okay, sure. You think going small silver coins. E.g., FDR dimes. Currently worth $1.20 melt value. Let’s say you have $250k in savings, etc. (And I know a lot of people with much more than that.) That’s 208K+ dimes. Good luck buying that amount of old silver coins in any denominations. (Total weight about 521 kilograms.) And multiply that by all the similar extremists also buying up the supply of such coins.
Just a reminder: a lot of things have value. A lot. Why the obsession with just a couple of things? Obsessing about a select few and thinking only in terms of extremes doesn’t trouble you at all?