I read a time travel novel where a guy got sent back in time and began “inventing” modern things to become a powerful figure in the past world. And one of the things he tried to make was gunpowder. But even though he knew the basic formula, he was never able to make it right.
And this is why, in my fantasy of “what do I stockpile for the apocalypse?”, I go for " stuff to help me heal people". I think I could do a decent job of that, and that would make me more valuable alive than dead to my neighbors. Heck, they wouldn’t even want to remove my fingers.
That’s true until we start mining asteroids for minerals. Then all bets are off.
If you want to talk about an apocalypse, then decide what sort of apocalypse it could be. A mere financial meltdown is different from some sort of post-nuclear scenario, or whatever it is that the survivalists think that only they will survive… if hyperinflation hits the USA, it might or might not bring down most of the economies of the world in a chain reaction, but some would still be left (North Korea, anyone?). A financial crash usually just means that the bankers wail about bad debts, all savings are lost, and the monetary system is rebooted. It’s been done before. It leaves most of the population impoverished, apart from those who had access to foreign currency and negotiable valuables such as jewelry and precious metals. Apart from those, who might just get lynched by an angry and envious mob, those who will profit are the craftsmen, the mechanics and the producers. It has to be a really serious collapse that everything just stops, and it would take more than a financial hiccup to do that.
Of course, once the economy gets back on its feet, the big rewards will once again go to those who shovel money around.
Sure, but in a post-apocalyptic scenario, we’re not mining asteroids for minerals. (Unless the apocalypse is caused by an asteroid impact.)
That’s why I said it depends. There are different types of collapse scenarios, and in some (few) having gold would or may be beneficial. It almost certainly would be, once you have some sort of trading civilization re-emerge, at least on some level. But during most of the society collapse scenarios I’ve actually looked at, the cost to benefit isn’t there, IMHO. Perhaps it might be worth while to find some stash of gold, say, and bury it in the hopes that, eventually, it would be worth something, but it’s not worth carrying around instead of, oh, say food, water, medicine, weapons and ammo…that sort of thing. Even if you are talking an actual community (which, I personally feel is how most survivors would actually, you know, survive, instead of the loner or a lone family), it would be more of a cost to benefit to focus on other things, extending beyond the basics of food to things like energy resources or other technology, especially some sort of sustainable technology. Gold would just be a lower priority, even in an initial barter society. I know I wouldn’t give up any of the basics I mentioned for some gold coins, and I think anyone who would is not going to survive very long.
Say you have 10 far-flung groups who each have surplus of 10 different commodities, and they get tired of figuring out the 100 different combinations of which thing trades for another thing, then they’ll start looking for a common currency. It will need to be something hard to falsify.
Precious metals would fit the bill, but whatever society decides is reputable and hard to falsify also would fit the bill. On the Island of Yap, they used Rai Stones. Of course there’s nothing special about stone, but it worked because everyone agreed that the stones were a store of value, and they had a reputational system that they trusted to decide who owned which stone, even when they couldn’t see it. Money is mostly based on what we believe.
If everybody is just trying to scrounge enough food, shelter, and clothing, nobody is going to need currency, and nobody is going to trust each other to create a currency.
I’m sure the bulk of us will be long dead by the time that becomes feasible.
I always like the story which, I think, was in Life, The Universe and Everything about the civilization that had one coin that was like the size of a mountain. I got a kick out of the imagery of that, especially if someone tried to buy something with it…and got change, perhaps with coins the size of houses or something. 
Anyway, another issue in this post-apocalypse fantasy stuff is that, the assumption is that most people are going to die off. Killed by disease, roving bands of leather clad bikers with stainless steel Gurkha knives, starvation or whatever. The thing is, however, that means that there will, literally, be tons of gold just laying around. It will be everywhere. In every jewelry store in every mall. Hell, in most people’s homes there is gold. So, it’s going to be a resource that isn’t scarce, not with a reduced population…hell, it’s not all that scarce NOW, considering how rich our society is. I’m not even a jewelry guy, nor is my wife and WE have some gold jewelry around the house. This doesn’t even get into people that I know who actually have gold coins or bars or whatever in their homes, or all of the gold that could be extracted from electronics (I have gold plated electrical leads on some of my equipment in my house). There is gold, literally, everywhere. People I know EAT the stuff on cakes sometimes. And of course there is oodles of silver, platinum and pretty much everything else. Maybe in 100 years in a world where civilization completely collapses (which I doubt), after the cities all fall completely apart and stuff is buried under mud and can’t be gotten too…maybe THEN gold will become scarce. But if some large percentage of the population dies off, gold is not going to be an issue getting ahold of. Which means, it’s not going to be scarce at all…just the opposite. So, assuming you wanted to try and use it for barter, you’d have to have a lot of it to be worth as much as that pig, or that bushel of corn or whatever WILL actually be scarce (maybe just clean water…that would be a major issue where I live if civilization went tits up).
Little Nemo, that sounds like Lest Darkness Fall. Generally, to make quality gunpowder requires the following steps:
first, the ingredients must be pure and high quality. The sulfur should have little or no sulfur oxides, traditionally tested by putting a small grain of the sulfur on a glass slide and heating it from below until it evaporates- there should be no visible stain left on the slide when done. The potassium nitrate was put through a multistage refining process, often by the conversion of intermediate salts like calcium nitrate, etc. Charcoal from particular woods or plants that seemed to produce the best results.
Second, to do a proper job of grinding and mixing the ingredients required a ball mill: a rotating drum or container that the ingredients were placed into along with hard agitating balls made of a NON-SPARKING substance such as marble. This would reduce the ingredients to a very fine powder or dust; it would also pound the sulfur and niter particles into the pores in the charcoal.
Third would be the process of corning: converting the fine “serpentine” powder into grains of optimized size. This would guarantee that the powder had just the right porosity for flame propagation. (In modern terms, black powder deflagrates rather than detonates; most of it’s explosive potential comes from igniting it in confined spaces or containers). The fine power from the ball mill would be wetted (different liquids were sworn by in various eras and places) to form a moist cake. This would be -carefully!- dried, the dry cake broken and the pieces passed through sieves to get grains of the desired size.
Finally of course the black powder needed to be properly stored in dry conditions, and usually “turned” every so often to minimize separation; even at that black powder was usually considered to have limits to its shelf life before it would stop producing adequate results.
Could be. There’s a whole genre of “Connecticut Yankee” books and I’ve read a number of them. So I don’t always have the individual details straight.
That’s fine if you’re digging your own gold out of the ground. But for most people selling gold means that at some past point they had to buy gold. And gold’s not a great investment. It’s not like the gold you bought improved during the time you owned it; if you buy an ounce of gold and hold it for twenty years, it’s still going to be an ounce of gold.
Gold’s value is based on its scarcity. And while very little gold leaves the economy, there’s new gold entering the economy every year. So gold is generally getting less scarce over time.
So you’re hoping that there will be an increase in public demand for gold. And that’s a fairly thin branch to base an investment strategy on.
And other people getting their fingers chopped off would help your business.
I thought of a better way to put it: there is a lot of different scenarios inbetween the modern world and non-stop purge. And in most of those scenarios, gold will have value.
There will be communities, even if they are a far cry from those we live in now. And there will be leaders, tyrants and merchants who will have more resources, including perishable goods, than can be traded today. And they may want to flaunt that they are leaders, tyrants and merchants.
Some upthread have suggested that trading gold will just put a big target on your head, and others will kill you or just steal it. That’s true, but it’s true of any commodity in a lawless scenario. But generally markets form anyway.
Straightdope: gold is worthless in a collapse scenario, no one will want it. But people will kill you for your gold because they want it so much.
Which one is it?
As long as there is trade and commerce, gold and silver will always be highly valued. The Hobbsean free for all people here are imagining rarely happens. And when it does, it is relatively short lived.
As for protecting yourself from hungry jackals, the best way to minimize your risk is to become a pauper. Oh, and don’t be a female, especially not a young and attractive one.
I think there’s a contrarian post-apocalypse reason to put away a few troy ounces of gold.
Should TSHTF, the immediate survivors would surely rush to buy gold, just as suburbanites empty stores of milk and bread when a blizzard is imminent.
I think gold’s value would spike for maybe 1-4 weeks, or about as long as it would take most people to feel really hungry.
If you start selling on day +3 and keep selling for a week after that, you could amass a lot of ammo and antibiotics.
Yeah, pretty much this. Depending on how hard the “collapse” is, I’d think short-term that life-essential commodities (food, clothing, shelter, maybe medicine and other first-aid supplies) and the means to defend them would have a higher value than gold.
But, once the “collapse” bottoms out and civilization starts to rise again, gold and precious gems would make a comeback.
Gold is useful in times of war or upheaval. It can get you through gates, onto boats etc.
But in the apocalypse, food weapons and shelter are better by miles.
If you buy some of the other things listed in this thread and hold them for twenty years, what do you think you could resell them for? Gold may not be a great investment, but as you said, after twenty years, it’s still an ounce of gold. It didn’t lose 50% of its value by becoming "used’ gold, it didn’t rot or become unreliable, or rusted or old.
Let’s say you set aside $1,000 in various apocalypse prep supplies, good sturdy stuff, ammo, chemicals, matches, food, etc. Twenty years later, the apocalypse doesn’t happen, and you sell that crap, are you getting $1,000? Even one year later do you get $1,000 back?
The plus about gold is that if you buy $1,000 of it, and try to resell it some time later, you’re not going to be stuck accepting $50 as long as the buyer agrees to take it out of your basement.
A rather likely scenario, which will have the financial mags moaning about catastrophe, is where the FRB under political pressure to fight unemployment allows the inflation rate to rise to 3½ or 4%. In another scenario, billions of humans are killed by nukes and weaponized bacteria and many cities lie in smoldering ruins. (Is there a list somewhere of projected dystopias, with likelihood estimates?)
I think astute planners may do well to consider scenarios falling in between the weakening-dollar and the billions-dead scenarios. 
Yes. 
And in the Yap Island example you cite, the larger coins were never physically moved after a transaction. The Islanders relied on oral memories to know who the coins currently belonged to!
Anyway, in many or most of the scenarios which seem plausible to me, gold will hold its value better than perishables and many non-perishables. I’ve seen a consistent but foolish tendency on this Board to deprecate the use of gold as a hedge.
Especially amusing is the notion of looters having to sift through “tons” of gold to find a gun and bullets. Is this America we’re talking about here?