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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
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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.