actually, if you go by the “fallout”(a popular pc/console game) theory of currency the new currency will be a material that was commonly made before the nukes but not made after … Since their culture is based on the 50s bomb shelter culture they use the old 16oz bottle metal bottlecaps…
I thought anything rare and cannot be mass produced would make for good currency.
Isn’t that why gold became currency in the first place?
Silver wards off vampires. Gold wards off… cockroaches? No, doesn’t bother them. Gold is extremely valuable in microelectronics and human imagination but of little use elsewhere. Not even in dental work now. Hint: Avoid gold teeth, you’ll only excite the bandits. They have pliers. Smile.
How does society collapse? Doesn’t matter - 90% will die quickly once food and medical supplies are stripped. Who will survive? The best-organized groups, not marauding thug-gangs or staunch individualists. LUCIFER’S HAMMER lays out a not-unlikely (if skewed) scenario.
Where would I want to be if the apocalypse doesn’t maim me? At an Elks Lodge next to a hospital by a farm. Will gold matter? Not as much as tending poultry.
That’s why gold was used as a currency five thousand years ago.
But how many other five thousand year old ideas are still the best available option?
Sure gold will have value. It has value right now.
But if you offered me a choice between a hundred thousand dollars in American currency and a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold, I would take the currency. I would take the currency even if you told me I had to wait ten years to collect.
No, it became currency because it’s shiny and pretty and back then we thought that meant it was magical.
This topic gets debated endlessly in"survivalist" and “prepper” circles…
As some of you might know from a thread I started, I have a decent amount of gold and silver in my possession.
The way I see it, we don’t need to speculate, we can simply look at current and past examples.
There are places that are in a state that we would consider a complete “collapse.” Do people in the Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Central African Republic, not value gold and silver?
Venezuelans right now can barely buy a bag of onions on a weeks salary. There was a report of a woman who was able to buy enough food for herself * and* her daughter for a month with a single oz of silver.
Throughout history, there have been at least 2 “end of the world as we know it” events ( the black plague and the dissolution of the Western Roman empire) and countless shtf scenarios. Did people stop valuing gold and silver then?
I’m not absolutely certain if people will value gold and silver in a complete “collapse.” But the historical performance of gold and silver as valuable forms of money is extremely strong- just something to think about. The US dollar only has fate, and it is the fate of every Fiat currency- complete devaluation.
I do very strongly agree with one point in the op; loners don’t do well in complete"collapse" scenarios. Not even rich and well armed ones. Having a tight knit clan or community who you trust with your life is more valuable than canned food, more valuable than small arms and ammunition, more valuable even than gold bricks.
I agree its an odd, speculation, what-if?, question and while I agree food and ammunition will have preference I wouldnt totally rule out gold.
I worked in the financial markets for 13 years. Nothing annoys me more than gold bugs. How many endless hours did I have to spend listening to them bend my ear off with endless conspiracy theories and not so subtle racism when Obama was President.
I’ve seen my fair share of apocalyptic films and read the books. Food or even whiskey would be better than gold.
And that my have something to do with gold’s value today. Because it was the coin of choice for governments. However governments have stepped away from gold as it is cheaper to print paper backed by nothing but ultimately the ability to print more paper.
We have moved away from gold on a societal level quite recently. I suspect the inhertain value of gold in such a breakdown no longer exists like it did. In this the ‘preppers’ got sold a ‘bill of goods’. Commercials stating how gold always heald value is misleading the customers, as the type of value they are hinting which is a value of a currency at is not the same as the value it has today as value of a commodity.
Did they think salt was magical too?
Seriously?
We actually need salt, and it used to be scarce. You don’t see a difference between:
Salt: scarce, useful
Gold: scarce, useless
?
Gold has value in Venezuela because you can stick it up your ass, walk to Bolivia and buy things with it. This necessitates a Bolivia to be extant for gold to have value. And a stack of US$100 bills served the same purpose, provided an alternative transportation location is found (or carrying capacity is particularly high) In other words, gold is great when ultimately you can trade it in a functioning society for something. Gold and diamonds had value in WW2 concentration camps because the ultimate recipients, guards, could take it outside the camp and into a functioning society, and later into a destroyed society with some contact to functioning society ( and some hope of functioning again, for the long term planners)
Now, it is easy to imagine a collapse in the US where similar circumstances occur. For example a destruction of America, but Guatemala or Turkey or China still being reasonably functional. In such a scenario, gold has value. But just because a scenario is easily imaginable, doesn’t mean it’s likely. Or has even a measurable probability to occur.
Ultimately, “light” prepping makes some amount of sense. We have seen scenarios where parts of the US were cut off from society as a whole, and normal distribution systems were locally in shambles. (Katrina comes to mind) Having a few weeks of food and meds makes good sense. But in a country awash with guns, in a prolonged collapse, even if gold retains some value, a guy with gold pretty soon becomes the guy that had some gold.
What*** I*** thought about gold would have no bearing whatsoever; it’s whether anyone else was accepting gold in trade. Generally it would matter what conditions you mean by post-apocalypse. If something like civilization is continuing, even in chaotic and uncertain circumstances, then there may be enough of a market economy left for gold to be useful (and to repeat, it’s whether someone else values gold). If we were literally reduced to tribal barbarism, then forget gold.
A friend of my brother’s was a prepper years ago before it was a ‘thing.’ He was proud of the fact he had about 100 lbs of gold stashed somewhere. I said, “Nope. Ammunition and whiskey make far better trade goods.”
If I was in a short-term SHTF situation, say a week or two, I’d hook up with my Burner buddies. If it was long term – a month to forever – my SCA buddies.
+1
The value of gold for jewelry, etc. was high way back when because there wasn’t a lot of it around and mining it took a lot of manpower and resources.
We are awash with gold, by comparison, now. In a post-collapse world the number of people who want to acquire gold for appearances sake will be small. Hardly any of the people with gold will be able to find such buyers. You can basically ignore this scenario.
Gold for uses like coating cable ends and such can also be ignored.
That leaves just the purely psychological aspect.
I agree with so many others. After a serious long-lasting collapse gold will be more a hazard to your health than anything. It would take a rebuilding back to a stable society before any rational person might care about it.
The issue with gold/silver of “How do people know how pure it is and how much it weighs?” can be solved with coinage. Old silver quarters and such. People know, or can quickly learn, what a silver dime looks like, etc. Which is a problem with gold. A Krugerrand (which was the dominant gold coin for a good while) is too big for most transactions. Are people going to know/trust smaller gold coins? And non-coins will be even less trusted.
Plus, even the silver coins value will probably depreciate. Since you can eat them or anything. So you lose value in them. OTOH, food, ammo, well-kept fuel, water filtration systems, etc. will gain value. Smart investment is important here. And that leaves out gold.
When there was a buzz about the Y2K bugs, I decided to have a week’s worth of food an water on hand, in case something important broke down. I figured I didn’t need more than that, because if the vital stuff wasn’t fixed in a week, I’d be screwed anyway.
Then I looked at my cupboard and realized I had a week’s worth of food. Not what I’d choose, but cereal, crackers, peanut butter, canned beans… So I bought some large bottles of water and put them in the basement. I threw them away a few years later, when I wondered how much plasticizer had leaked into the water, and couldn’t think of why I’d ever choose stale bottled water over fresh tap water.
Gold still makes AWESOME false teeth. It’s much tougher and less brittle than the other options. I got gold so I can still crack nuts and bones with my teeth, not as currency.
What all those places have in common is that they are not cut off from functioning economies. Read what isosleepy wrote.
None of those involved a complete breakdown of even the local economies. And gold was the standard currency at the time.
Anyway, come the apocalypse, if I am still alive, I will value gold to the extent my neighbors value it. But if I had to stock up on anything, it would be pain killers and antibiotics. I’m not a killer, someone else is going to have to wield that gun. But I’m a decent healer. Maybe my neighbors would value me enough to protect me, or maybe not. But that’s my best shot, that and being a decent tinkerer.
This is reliant on other, stable, societies existing where you can trade your precious metals for better currencies than those of their collapsed nations. And, in this modern age, even in a collapsed state, you can find people trading outside of it who will want your metal for that purpose. If I’m in the Congo, gold has value because it can be traded outside of the Congo. If the whole world is the Congo, its worth is going to drop significantly because what established societies are you going to trade it to?