274
Russia Starts Selling Off Its Gold Reserves to Fund the War Budget, Breaking a Long-Held Taboo
(united24media.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
274 points (99.3% liked)
Ukraine
10912 readers
621 users here now
News and discussion related to Ukraine
Community Rules
🇺🇦 Sympathy for enemy combatants is prohibited.
🌻🤢No content depicting extreme violence or gore.
💥Posts containing combat footage should include [Combat] in title
🚷Combat videos containing any footage of a visible human involved must be flagged NSFW
❗ Server Rules
- Remember the human! (no harassment, threats, etc.)
- No racism or other discrimination
- No Nazis, QAnon or similar
- No porn
- No ads or spam (includes charities)
- No content against Finnish law
💳 Defense Aid 💥
💳 Humanitarian Aid ⚕️⛑️
🪖 Volunteer with the International Legionnaires
See also:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Gold is as worthless as paper
When will we stop this practice of saying something worthless is valuable just so that greedy fuckers can hoard that crap?
My man; everything is worthless unless a critical mass of people find value in it.
If every single person in the entire world except you refused to acknowledge the US dollar tomorrow, it would become worthless.
The same goes for every currency having ever existed.
"crypto apes"
FALSE!
If a lot of people want to pay for it, it's obviously not worthless.
Gold also has value as a metal of many uses, and in many situations gold is not easy to replace.
So even without being pretty and non corrosive and rare, it would still have value.
Also your post is extremely besides the point of Russia liquidating assets.
Price aside, gold is a very useful metal.
Paper has many uses as well.
You can grow trees and make as much paper as you want.
You can't do the same with gold.
Paper is cheap because it is dirt cheap to make and the resources for it are both plentiful and easy to get at.
Gold is expensive, because it's in limited supply, and you can't make gold, and gold is very hard to extract. It also has many functions due to its special properties and it is often hard to replace with other materials.
And it is soooooo stable! Virtually no oxidization, easy to clean and remelt/recast. It holds its physical properties insanely well
Yes and no: Gold has many important properties and is relatively rare, but what really makes it expensive is that enough people agree that it's worth something.
If the only market for gold was for actual applications where gold is needed, the price would absolutely tank.
No it would not tank to be as worthless as paper, which was what I argued against.
You are arguing against a strawman.
If gold was only used industrially like steel or other metals, and the value was according to that, it would still be way more expensive than steel and aluminum.
Yes the shortage inflates the price, I never argued it didn't. But it is absolutely not worthless as the post I responded to claimed.
If the gold price dropped significantly it would be used more often, in turn driving the price back up due to demand and limited supply.
You’re correct and anyone saying gold is worthless, or worth very little, is a fool.
You are spot on that if gold was cheaper it would be used more. It is such an amazing material.
First, I cannot grow trees in my small rented flat. And felling trees and turning them into paper is quite a hard work, it's only cheap at an industrial scale and it kinda fucks up the environment a bit. Paper used to be an expensive commodity (people would wrote letters like this).
The properties that make gold expensive are its limited supply, as you pointed, and the fact that it doesn't degrades with time, which make it a great material to use to 'store value'. It has some other interesting physical properties that make it useful, but those aren't the main reasons of its price.
Actually it's one of the more stable things out there. It resists economic issues.
Things have little intrinsic value. They are only worth what people will pay for them. If the price of gold upsets you, please do not investigate the stock exchange.
Except gold has huge intrinsic value because it's not that common and exceedingly useful.
Diamonds, diamonds are the scam that seems to be implied here.
Absolutely but most of its value is due to it being rare…. And shiny. The industrial uses were just a bonus we worked out later. In the early days it was valuable simply because we all told ourselves it was worth a certain amount of chickens.
There are lots of people willing to buy gold, and have been for millennia. Most paper currency is worthless 200 years later.