alt.hn

5/20/2026 at 9:09:40 AM

A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

 https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/05/14/the-weird-wild-story-of-humanitys-obsession-with-gold

by andsoitis

5/20/2026 at 11:23:13 AM

It is interesting that gold was able to retain its value after the industrial revolution. It could have gone the way of aluminum, once twice as valuable as gold, but now used in disposable drink containers. At the time of the alchemists, there was no way to know that some metals were actually distillable from common rocks and others genuinely rare and impossible to manufacture with even quite advanced technology.

EDIT: Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway.

by drhagen

5/20/2026 at 11:42:29 AM

>Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway.

I think also the scarcity plays a factor, the estimates that I'm seeing after short search being that there's about 10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold.

by 3form

5/20/2026 at 11:49:23 AM

This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.”

The cap on the washington monument is aluminum, because at the time it was still a precious metal.

The guy who figured out how to electrolyze it out of ore went on to create the main company in the US that produced it, and chose to call it aluminum instead of aluminium, thus leading to the split in spelling. That story may be apocryphal though.

by mplanchard

5/21/2026 at 12:32:49 PM

The History Guy did a video on "The History of Aluminum": https://youtu.be/Nx16c6SB4kQ?si=jqaObtbTp3uNNjj3

From what I recall of the video, two people independently worked out the chemistry for cheaper aluminum. (I believe the video also mentions the source of the aluminum/alumininium name difference.)

by Paul_Clayton

5/20/2026 at 2:52:44 PM

>This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.”

Sure, but it also said "it could have gone the way of aluminum", which is mostly where my point rests: I don't really see how. The disparity of volume seems to explain it to me fully.

by 3form

5/20/2026 at 11:46:55 AM

There is now, but it wasn't really extractable at all until electrochemistry.

by pjc50

5/20/2026 at 3:59:56 PM

Right, but it was still there to extract. All it needed was electrochemistry.

Whereas with gold, it isn't there in the rocks - not in the same amounts. No future chemical wizardry is going to make it extractable, because it isn't there to extract.

To make gold more abundant is going to take transmutation, which is a much bigger ask.

Now, if you want to say that the ancients didn't know that aluminum was there and gold wasn't, and therefore lucked out by picking the one that wasn't there, I would agree with that.

by AnimalMuppet

5/20/2026 at 6:40:40 PM

The GGP said “10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold,” which the “processed” part, which is I think what GP was responding to: of course the scarcity of available gold relative to aluminum drives its value, but that relative scarcity only exists due to modern electrochemistry: previously, “processed” aluminum and gold were similarly scarce.

People talk about stuff like extracting gold from seawater, so it also isn’t a given that the scarcity difference will always remain what it is.

by mplanchard

5/20/2026 at 12:17:17 PM

I think gold's chemistry actually is why gold has been and remains a store of value.

It is rare, inert, malleable, has a low melting point and has a distinct unique colour.

All of these are quite useful for being a store of value:

- inert: gold from 10000 years ago is basically exactly the same

- malleable: it is easy to subdivide for coinage (compare with diamonds for an extreme example)

- low melting point: easy to purify (and melting temp is a decent purity check)

- distinct colour: less useful now but being so distinct from other metals makes it easier to spot vs the many silvery coloured metals

The funny thing is that all these store of value properties also make it less useful: inert means it's not reactive and has fewer forms/compounds

Malleable, lower melting temp and rare makes it a poor choice for typical metal usages...

by djtango

5/20/2026 at 10:56:44 AM

I've read elsewhere that one of gold's biggest virtues as a store of value on planet earth is that it isn't so rare as to be useless, but it's rare enough that it functions as currency or high value storage. A goldilocks material for the purpose of wealth transfer and storage.

by Schlagbohrer

5/20/2026 at 12:22:10 PM

It's also chemically inert and very dense, so a coin/ingot that weights a certain amount is smaller and can be stored for long periods of time. It's so dense that it's pretty much forgery-proof, as any material you use in the forgery is either more expensive or less dense.

by PowerElectronix

5/20/2026 at 11:55:55 AM

It is also relatively easy to work, since ancient times. Iridium is the rarest metal, so rare and hard to work that it is not practical.

by jcarrano

5/20/2026 at 12:21:10 PM

Yes! Exactly - there are plenty of other rare metals but many of them are really hard to work with. Iridium, Rhodium and Platinum are plenty rare but mankind has lacked the technology to do anything with them for most of history

by djtango

5/20/2026 at 3:52:02 PM

> Its well-documented contributions to deflationary and financial crises, including the Depression, go curiously undiscussed in this book.

Why is deflation viewed as such a bad thing? If you've got savings in a deflationary time, your money becomes more valuable, not less. Don't we want to encourage savings?

by mikewarot

5/21/2026 at 8:40:08 AM

Actually no. Money is probably the most misunderstood thing in the world. While saving money seems logical from an individual perspective on the macro level of the economy it can be a huge problem because everybodies income depends on money constantly being spent. This is a classic case of a "fallacy of composition".

To illustrate that it's often helpful to think in extreme scenarios. Imagine every household starts to save 100% of its monetary income. What does that mean? It means that nothing is sold anymore and companies have 0 revenue which will soon lead to a complete collapse of the economy and everybody becoming unemployed and loosing all their income as well unless the companies will take on debt to keep paying the wages/profits (which they will not do when there is no demand for their products).

Money needs to be spent or else demand will drop and the economy can enter a vicious downward spiral (a deflationary collapse / debt deflation). The most impressive example of that was the great depression.

If some sector of the economy wants to net save (usually those are the households) to keep the same level of economic activity (and therefore jobs and income) somebody else needs to spend money they don't have, i.e. they need to go into debt.

The main issue is that in a society with division of labor there is no mechanism that keeps saving and investing in line so that employment and income is kept on a stable level. The mainstream neoclassical economic theory claims that the interest rate is always and automatically making sure that for every dollar saved someone else will invest it but this is based on the assumption that investors have infinite and complete knowledge about what everybody else will do in the future and that the economy will always and necessarily tend towards an equilibrium state of full employment. They are obsessed with "equilibrium" which is why in mainstream publications you will find that word everywhere. But in reality the economy is a non-equilibrium complex system with pro-cyclical feedback loops and all the interesting characteristics worth studying are non-equilibrium behaviors of the system.

Some recommended literature regarding that topic:

- The two essays "What is money?" and "The credit theory of money" by Alfred Mitchell-Innes - "The theory of economic development: an inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest, and the business cycle" by Joseph Schumpeter - "Debunking economics" by Steve Keen - "Can it happen again?" by Hyman Minsky - "Debt: The first 5000 years" by David Graeber

Money is credit. It's not an asset. Gold or Bitcoin are not money, they are an asset. The economy is credit-based, it's not a barter economy.

by trixn86

5/21/2026 at 5:27:35 PM

Very well put. I'd add Money and Goverment by Skidelsky to the list of recommendations.

by arximboldi

5/20/2026 at 3:57:30 PM

If you have debts instead of savings, deflation is utterly ruinous. An awful lot of people have debts.

Deflation does far more damage than inflation. This is why the Federal Reserve fears deflation a lot more than deflation.

by AnimalMuppet

5/20/2026 at 12:16:19 PM

“Mr Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft sliminess that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat. And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup. But, above all, Mr Bond, I love the power that gold alone gives to its owner — the magic of controlling energy, exacting labour, fulfilling one’s every wish and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds, even souls. Yes, Mr Bond, I have worked all my life for gold and, in return, gold has worked for me and for those enterprises that I have espoused. I ask you,’ Goldfinger gazed earnestly at Bond, ‘is there any other substance on earth that so rewards its owner?’”

by hmg-ocean

5/20/2026 at 10:53:51 PM

I'm amazed noone has quoted Warren Buffet on this subject:

“[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”

The principle point being: "It has no utility".

Like crypto, it's primary function in the modern economy is financial crime...

by johnea

5/21/2026 at 2:06:16 AM

Being a store of value is utility.

by Ferret7446

5/21/2026 at 12:12:58 PM

[dead]

by marbro

5/20/2026 at 7:12:39 PM

Not one mention of the Annunaki anywhere!

by Henchman21

5/20/2026 at 12:05:33 PM

I have mentioned this in the past, we are on an "energy" standard as opposed to a "gold" standard and to me, in reality, we have been since the industrial revolution. Just Gold and Currency is a means for people to access energy.

Until recently it was an "Oil Standard". But now we are in transition from Oil to Renewals. I think that transition is causing some if not most of the political issues we are having now.

With renewals, the source is always available and everyone just needs to purchase the means of accessing it once. With Oil, you need to constantly "pay" someone to get that energy, so many people/companies know their gravy train is ending and they are doing all the can to keep us using fossil fuels.

Also there is an on-going struggle on who produces the items needed to access sun and wind power. Right now China is easily winning that struggle.

by jmclnx

5/20/2026 at 11:05:09 AM

https://archive.is/ShyUM

Article is a brief review of the book "The Secret History of Gold" by Dominic Frisby.

by hackernudes

5/20/2026 at 12:08:58 PM

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by trippsydrippsy

5/20/2026 at 5:30:39 PM

[dead]

by theturtle

5/20/2026 at 11:23:20 AM

[flagged]

by clearstack

5/20/2026 at 11:25:53 AM

Paper/plastic currency (cash) has 0 FCF, 0 earnings, 0 dividends. The whole thesis is you trade it at a deprecated rate later.

You can trade gold and cash with people a lot more easily than an equity in your brokerage account.

by rationalist

5/20/2026 at 1:47:53 PM

It's just not the same when your crew has another ship's crew at its mercy, loaded blunderbusses at the ready, waiting for the leather sacks and chests full of bitcoin to be turned over.

by RajT88

5/20/2026 at 12:14:10 PM

No the thesis of cash is that it's a legally enforced means to extinguish debts within a certain legal jurisdiction.

A court cannot generally find that I must furnish someone with some weight of gold for example but they can find a monetary value in sovereign currency which I must supply.

by XorNot

5/20/2026 at 12:21:17 PM

The thesis of cash is that governments and their influencers can turn some knobs and decrease its value and enrich themselves simultaneously by creating more of it. A lot of it as debt for the normals.

by teekert

5/20/2026 at 2:29:41 PM

incoherent

by nh23423fefe

5/20/2026 at 12:17:13 PM

The thesis for gold is that it holds its value in times of war when companies and governments fall apart.

by pydry

5/20/2026 at 1:55:13 PM

Any war that has the USD no longer be accepted has significant existential risk, and besides if things devolve that much you should be worrying about any entity holding the gold for you or someone killing you for the gold you personally hold.

by Yossarrian22

5/20/2026 at 12:11:07 PM

Yeah man you missed the point. Gold is not good as an investment vehicle.

As a daily currency, it also has sharp downsides, but at least it’s not all bad.

by karlgkk

5/20/2026 at 2:18:42 PM

I'm sorry, I didn't make my point well, that's on me. My point was that gold isn't just an investment.

by rationalist

5/20/2026 at 12:19:25 PM

I think the point is that when it comes to investment vehicles, gold generally beats cash. Oh and that means that in the last 20 years or so (ie. including the period where it didn't appreciate much), physical gold beats a balance in bank accounts.

Inflation means "interest" on gold, measured in reliable currencies like USD or EUR, is at least 4%. Far more than you will get from any bank.

Of course this goes for anything, so you might want to select something with less regulation attached to it. On the other hand, gold is really dense and "liquid" (easy to sell), which are great advantages to have for a store of wealth. And then there's the recent history of gold prices (which is due to the third world attempting to use anything but dollars but not succeeding at it, but one assumes it will end)

But yes, gold makes less than you'll probably get on the S&P500.

by spwa4

5/20/2026 at 12:17:04 PM

"You can trade gold ... easily"

Only for very large amounts of money. It can't easily be subdivided. Oh and this is illegal in most countries.

But yeah, what people forget is that gold is incredibly dense. Nearly double lead's density. This means 1kg of gold is about the size of a nokia 3360, and worth close to 150,000$. A very large amount of gold doesn't take up much volume at all.

... which also means that people "stealing gold" like in the bond movies is totally unrealistic. If you loaded a pallet of gold bars (12.5 kg a piece, 200 gold bars, about 2.5 tons, 375 million USD) into a standard van, that van would probably just break down. And carrying 10 gold bars, 20 million USD in a backpack? Not happening.

(which frankly Trump is abusing because of course the density of gold means that any facility storing gold, including Fort Knox, is going to "look empty")

by spwa4

5/21/2026 at 11:34:23 AM

[dead]

by marbro

5/20/2026 at 11:36:55 AM

You have a point. And yet, today, you can buy even more bread and clothes and materials with an ounce of gold than you could 2000 years ago. Meanwhile, what happened to all of the businesses and currencies over the last few millennia? Where will the FCF of any random company be in 50 years? Will gold still be valuable then?

The staying power of gold is a value in itself.

by christophilus

5/20/2026 at 11:33:02 AM

You don’t get any of the FCF or earnings for owning equity, if a stock doesn’t pay dividends it’s the same thesis that someone will pay more for it later

by an0malous

5/20/2026 at 12:13:15 PM

Or they will pay dividends later.

by FergusArgyll

5/20/2026 at 1:22:45 PM

Correct: gold is a store of value, not an investment.

In an ideal world gold would be convertible to and from currency tax free so it could be used as such. A gold-backed currency is too constrained by the supply of gold in the world, but tax-free gold would allow people to avoid currency depreciation and the credit collapses of our current debt-based system without paying a penalty.

by recursivedoubts

5/20/2026 at 7:19:03 PM

Gold is popular as jewellery. The price is determined largely by the cost of mining it and so has remained somewhat stable compared to the cost of things like houses for centuries, far more so than other money like things.

by tim333

5/20/2026 at 12:18:50 PM

That's ok - given central banks' continued love of gold, I have no qualms of there being a buyer in my lifetime and probably my kids'

by djtango

5/20/2026 at 11:40:55 AM

When equities are priced in gold, they peaked in 1999, and have broadly been downhill since then. For reference, see the price of SPY/XAUUSD.

by OutOfHere

5/20/2026 at 11:12:23 AM

Name one thing in the universe which is better than gold? Tip: You can't.

by carlosjobim

5/20/2026 at 11:25:37 AM

Nothing is better than gold. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Therefore a ham sandwich is better than gold.

by euroderf

5/20/2026 at 2:31:52 PM

the scholastics were right about everything

by nh23423fefe

5/20/2026 at 11:33:20 AM

You’re lost in the desert, with no food or water but only a lump of gold. Everything is fine because nothing in the universe is better than gold.

by nkrisc

5/20/2026 at 11:53:53 AM

The movie “The treasure of the Sierra Madras” does a good job of putting gold in it’s place.

by detourdog

5/20/2026 at 12:55:21 PM

Better than being in the desert with no food, no water and no gold.

by carlosjobim

5/20/2026 at 11:36:25 AM

How much better to get wisdom than gold, to get insight rather than silver!

-- Proverbs 16:16

by nvader

5/20/2026 at 12:15:34 PM

The fear of GOD is pure, abiding forever; the judgments of GOD are true, righteous altogether, more desirable than gold, than much fine gold; sweeter than honey, than drippings of the comb.

-- Psalms 19

by FergusArgyll

5/20/2026 at 11:38:34 AM

Per gram you can sell printer ink for more.

by RobotToaster

5/20/2026 at 5:45:16 PM

You have not followed the gold price over the last couple of years... Definitely not true anymore.

A quick search says maybe the last year it was true was in 2003.

by Paradigm2020

5/20/2026 at 12:42:33 PM

If you don't define your domain, "better" is vacuous of meaning, as nothing and everything is "better" than gold.

by technothrasher

5/20/2026 at 11:22:10 AM

Diamonds? You can use them in a drill bit.

by olau

5/20/2026 at 1:58:18 PM

Depending on the timeframe I think palladium has traded higher per oz at times

by Yossarrian22

5/20/2026 at 1:30:01 PM

Easy, boobs

by the_real_cher

5/20/2026 at 11:25:10 AM

Oxygen

by ReptileMan

5/20/2026 at 1:00:45 PM

Gold is a noble metal and doesn't react with anything.

Oxygen is one of the most ignoble gases, and reacts with almost everything.

by carlosjobim

5/20/2026 at 11:20:55 AM

Iron. For the purpose of building bridges.

by voxlax

5/21/2026 at 8:54:24 AM

> Name one thing in the universe which is better than gold?

Time.

by andsoitis

5/20/2026 at 12:16:33 PM

Better than gold in what aspect? Good luck trying to move to a different country and bringing all your gold with you without filling out a hell of a lot of forms and risking confidcation for "money laundering". Bitcoin doesn't have this problem

The supply of gold is always inflating. One day we will have asteroid mining of gold and it will be inflated even more. Bitcoin doesn't have this problem.

Nobody will accept your gold for a cup of coffee in day to day life, but restraints and coffee shops will increasingly take your bitcoin over lightning.

by KetoManx64

5/20/2026 at 12:41:43 PM

Doesn't bitcoin have a big potential problem of someone breaking asymmetric cryptography.

by luka598

5/20/2026 at 4:27:01 PM

Bitcoin is a protocol which has evolved over time to meet the needs of its users. In the next decade or so, Bitcoin will have a soft fork to deal with the problem of quantum computers.

Even if a state actor manages to break the asymmetric cryptography before then (literally impossible to get enough compute power to do this currently), the users can just fork the blockchain before that happens, fix the bug, and continue on.

by KetoManx64

5/20/2026 at 12:58:46 PM

Have you tried? Gold is tax free for import and export practically everywhere. At most you need to declare it, and that's it. Customs look at your declaration for one second and waves you by. Same with large amounts of fiat money.

And even if you want to "smuggle" gold, it's not hard either. Nothing is easier.

> One day we will have asteroid mining of gold

Rejoice, that will be the best day in the history of humanity!

by carlosjobim

5/20/2026 at 11:27:07 AM

Uranium? Tricky to fuel a nuclear reactor with gold.

Hydrocarbons? Everything from making life to providing energy.

Silicon? Making silicon chips.

Oxygen? I like breathing.

by rwmj

5/20/2026 at 11:25:49 AM

Why is everything "wild" and "cooked" and "dead" these days? It seems that every title or text I see has those words. I guess it's the Claudeification of everything.

by stavros

5/20/2026 at 11:31:22 AM

It's just Gen-Z speak, nothing to do with Claude (other than being a vessel for said speak)

by incognito124

5/20/2026 at 11:56:18 AM

I’m gen-x and used wild in of my my HN comments and it seemed to trigger some responders. I was using as a synonym for unexpected. Next time maybe I’ll use whacky instead.

by detourdog

5/20/2026 at 12:00:27 PM

I like wild, it’s a fun word. No need to change if you don’t want to just on account of some grouches here!

by stephen_g

5/20/2026 at 12:04:01 PM

we GenX-ers will be placated by any mention of Oscar the Grouch.

by shermantanktop

5/20/2026 at 12:16:38 PM

I'm gen-x too (56) and remember wild used heavily in the mid to late 80s. Wild to hear it used so liberally once again!

by mgcross

5/20/2026 at 12:02:55 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/20/2026 at 10:57:13 AM

Is this an ad for shady "buy gold" investment scams?

by sandworm101