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This comment actually made me think and look it up. I never thought about this. Why is gold valuable?

Yeah you were basically right. Because societies decided it would be. I mean gold has some practical applications but nothing that would justify it’s price.

First link I found says this:

Gold’s value is ultimately a social c- onstruction; its worth is sustained by ourcollective agreement about its importance and our belief in its future value.
Gold’s physical properties—its lustrous quality, relative scarcity, durability, and difficulty of extraction—reinforce and justify its perceived value.
Unlike other precious metals, gold strikes a balance of being rare enough to be precious but abundant enough to serve as a practical medium of exchange.

So I guess rare enough yet abundand enough and durable enough.

Wild tbh

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GentriFriedRice@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Planet money had great episode on this topic if you’re interested npr.org/…/-price-of-gold-periodic-table-elements

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Rooster326@programming.dev ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
But without gold how will we ever make high quality HDMI cables?

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Gathorall@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That’s a bit light on the “balance” many metals are precious and fairly rare, their physical characteristics like being poisonous, being visually indistinguishable from various cheap metals or malleable to the degree they will wear out as a coin are some issues.

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TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Now look up conspiracy theorists who are obsessed with gold standard and its abandonment.

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Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Btw, we just transmuted our first gold just recently.

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- captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yeah but was the process cheaper than buying it? Converting a million dollars of lanthenides and energy into a few thousand dollars of gold isn’t a great trade off
  
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  - Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Well, no. And I think it was just not a few atoms. But we did it.
    
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