▲ 361 ▼ Russia Starts Selling Off Its Gold Reserves to Fund the War Budget, Breaking a Long-Held Taboo (united24media.com) submitted 11 months ago by supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz 50 comments fedilink hide all child comments Buying one way tickets to hell for Russian soldiers by selling off Russia's gold and treasure... What will be left when all the humans and gold have been carelessly traded away by Putin to power the mindless Russian war machine?
[+] Buffalox@lemmy.world 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children) [removed by mod] permalink fedilink source parent hideshow 4 child comments replies: [–] frank@sopuli.xyz 4 points 11 months ago And it is soooooo stable! Virtually no oxidization, easy to clean and remelt/recast. It holds its physical properties insanely well permalink fedilink source parent [–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 child) 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. permalink fedilink source parent hideshow 1 child comment load more comments (1 reply) [+] OfCourseNot@fedia.io -17 points 11 months ago 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. permalink fedilink source parent
[–] frank@sopuli.xyz 4 points 11 months ago And it is soooooo stable! Virtually no oxidization, easy to clean and remelt/recast. It holds its physical properties insanely well permalink fedilink source parent
[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 child) 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. permalink fedilink source parent hideshow 1 child comment load more comments (1 reply)
[+] OfCourseNot@fedia.io -17 points 11 months ago 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. permalink fedilink source parent