Talk:Metal as money

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[edit] Why not <some other article>?

I think I should explain very briefly why I consider this article necessary.

Gold as an investment is mostly about the use of gold as a store of value - gold is not an investment in the classical sense (gold does not provide the person holding gold a return - if you assume that at some point in the future, no matter how far away, there will be no valuable gold (for example, because humans will be able to produce gold at will from other matter, or because humans might be extinct), all people who ever bought and then sold gold will have "averaged" zero). It is also limited to gold.

Gold standard is mostly about the historical period when there was a promise, explicit and honoured at first and then increasingly shady, to redeem money in gold. The important thing here is that it is limited to a time period when there were banknotes, and legal tender laws forced you to accept them in lieu of gold. It doesn't cover the periods before and after. It is also limited to gold.

Digital gold currency is mostly a list of companies currently providing that service. It is also limited to gold.

Precious metal is, well, limited to precious metals. Copper just doesn't belong in there, but it so happens the first banknotes in Europe were issued for copper coins.

Gold coin, silver coin, platinum coin: limited to one metal. Doesn't include use of representative money.

The alternative might have been to create something like valuable metal, though no simple title comes to mind for what this really is about - a material that, above its value for its industrial and ornamental use, just seems to be considered universally valuable. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't even know where to start looking for such information.

RandomP 00:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)