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As Gold Hits New Record, Some See Warning Signs of Civilizational Collapse
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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I'm sorry, what? Gold has value regardless of if there's a government backing it or not. That's the entire point of investing in it, as a buffer for when fiat loses its value.
That's the general idea, yeah. But gold investments are just a kind of construct where you legally own a certain amount of gold. Wether anyone respects your right of ownership when civilization collapses... we'll see about that.
Brb buying bulits and grain
What value? Can't eat it, makes shitty tools. It's shiny, but I'm not going to trade ny potatoes for shiny in a survival situation.
You can starve sitting on a pile of gold.
For gold to be valuable you still need social stability.
Bottle caps are where it's at.
It's more for when things have settled down a bit. Imagine you're leading a group of people who secured a good territory and you're growing more potatoes than you need. You may want jewelry made of gold to show how powerful and prosperous you are, both to your followers and to those outside. And you can give gold to particularily important followers, and to other leaders, in a very public ceremony, to show everyone that those leaders are beneath you.
Totally. I was more commenting on the theory of gold having this magical inherent objective value. Which it doesn't, it's a commodity like any other.
Honestly as a value store, land is probably better.
Land isn’t portable. Gold is durable, portable and compact.
The value of gold lies in the fact that other men may be disposed to work their ass off in order to have some shiny things to gift to women in order to have sex. As you can imagine, the power of gold amongst married couples drastically decreases.
Besides this... History shows humans always gave value to gold. For some reason we got very used into associating gold with value. As such, it is probably something good to have if economy collapses. But it doesn't really matter if society collapsed.
Gold is supposed to represent something finite that's hard to dig out of the ground. It's like the antithesis of fiat currency that way. i think of it like a hedge against the dollar like with some cryptos. That said I only think US civilization would collapse while the rest of the world moves on or divvies up its corpse.
That is valid for many other resources: iron, silicon, carbon, carrots whatever. Gold has always been attributed some special value, throughout history. That is ok. I don't think US civilization is going to collapse, why would you think that?
Gold has always been valued because it has some important attributes that few, if any, other substances have.
It won't tarnish or oxidize, so it will look just as shiny and beautiful a thousand years from now.
It is extremely malleable, easily crafted into any shape. It can be hammered thin enough to be a foil, or drawn into a wire as thin as a human hair.
It has a relatively low melting point, making it easy to cast.
It is extremely conductive, and is the conductive material of choice when price is no object.
There are other unique properties, but the point is that much of Gold's value derives from being significantly, even uniquely, different from most other substances, giving it an intrinsic value beyond its monetary value.
How many things relevant in your life are made out of gold? I guess jewellery, computer and phone. Real things that matter to people the most are completely unrelated to gold.
The fact that it is a material that does not degrade makes it a good choice as a vector for value. It is good to be used as money for that reason. If you use iron as money it will eventually rust out and leave you broke.
The other properties of gold are quite irrelevant to the fact that it has been selected (over and over again through history) as a value vector.
My computer and my phone are preeeeeeeeeetty important to my life, though.
The very article linked to this post talks about civilizational collapse of the US similar to the Roman republic.
Gold as a unit of currency is only about 2500 years old. Prior to that it was used heavily in jewelry and adornments. Probably because it's not good for much else and it happens to be fantastic as a jewelry material. It's shiney, doesn't tarnish, and is easy to work with hand tools.
The association with wealth probably came about as a result of being associated with expensive jewelry.
To be clear, modern historians do not look for piles of gold to determine relatively how wealthy a society was. They look at their ability to produce grain and other things that facilitated trade. Because gold is only valuable as a mechanism to facilitate trade. To a civilization more worried about feeding itself than foreign luxuries, it's quite worthless.
Gold is actually useful for things other than jewelry.
Jup, many drugs have a market price similar to gold, so better invest into that, they can always be sold...
(Di$claimer: The information provided is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or advising on drug trafficking. No guarantee is given regarding the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content. Any investment decisions are made at your own risk. The author assumes no liability for financial losses or other damages resulting from the use of this information.)
No it doesn't. Not anymore.
Not beyond its industrial uses, at least.
That’s incorrect. Gold still has value because it has utility.
The fact that you are being downvoted for this is pretty shocking.
He means regular money would be worthless as well as stocks and such. And as rich people own gold, but own much more of the other, he argues they would like to avoid collapse.
However, I don't think they really can. Also, if it comes to recession very rich people tend to profit.