Now not even gold is safe....

Nope.

The generally accepted characteristics of money are: durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, and acceptability (medium of exchange).

Gold, and silver, have met those conditions for thousands of years, and thus are money.....even though those who can print "money" have worked hard to convince us otherwise. Stones don't meet the divisibility, uniformity, or most importantly the limited supply aspects of money.

"Gold is money, all else is credit" said JP Morgan.

 

No.....had a bit of a falling out with the site. They had a guy come on the site that posted literally thousands of posts of info easily found all over the net and almost zero first hand experience or opinion about anything. To me it was just spam, and I called him on it to knock it off. I got no support from the other mods, including the co-host of the podcast, apparently quantity of posts being more important than quality of posts, so we parted company and I go there no more. Shame.....at one time, it was the premier site for all things gold and silver related.....but all good things come to an end I guess.

 

Easy enough to argue that gold is divisible (as are other items sometimes used for commercial exchanges) but one could say that rocks satisfy all those criteria short of limited supply. After all, sand, a product of rocks, is pretty divisible to as many grades as you might like. Clearly, acceptability does factor in, but all that beggars the question. Commerce requires more or less of agreement as to the value of the commodity used in the particular exchange.
Portability also raises its ugly head. Eventually the commodity will require storage, say like a biblical grain silo. Once it's there, no matter how it got there, ownership becomes sorta nebulous. So paper gets moved around rather than bushels of corn.
Andy, we ARE on the same page. Gold is no more safe than bronze coinage.

 

I'll keep my gold and silver, You other cats can light your cigar with the paper fantasy funds.

 

Gold shot if you need small denominations of gold.

 

Lead ain't bad either!

 

Problem I'd think with shot is not knowing the purity.....could be gold coated lead shot ! US gold coins go down to 1/10 oz and then you'd switch to silver for change....pre-65 US dimes contain only around 0.07 ounces of silver.

In the old days, when small coinage was much harder to come by, they cut Spanish "pieces of 8" coins (roughly equal to a silver dollar) in 'bits' with a hatchet. A 'bit' was a 1/8 slice of the pie...from which came the saying "2 bits" ( a quarter) or "4 bits" ( half dollar) and so on.

 

I wonder what happened to all those bits? I have never seen one, I'm sure they are out there in someones collection?

 

Probably some in collections, probably most gone to the melting pot.

This site makes reproductions:
Old Dominion Forge

 

Gold shot can be hammer out and acid tested or use water displacement to check density.
This is like archimedes level technology.
Plus gold that is faked is usually 1 ounce and larger.

 

If all you show is a fragment of gold ,no one thinks much of it,
but if your showing of several lbs of gold your inviting trouble, begging some one to try and steal it including the government.
Money is the same thing, seems to me even things can attract unwanted attention.
If you re going to be cheap with it and leave it as it is normally recognized, bullion or coin for a speedy exchange your fooling your self . some one sharp is going to test the gold one way or another. altering it into something obscure however might be able to hide it in plain sight.

 

Paint it black.
(I got the idea from a song)

 

Jones on Gold!