Saw this video about gold, it’s chemical structure and malleability. I still don’t understand why gold is worth anything at all……
In: 236
Imagine you’re an ancient king, and you’re trying to figure out how to feed your army without just beating up the citizens and stealing their food, or asking for charity.
You are fortunate enough to own the only gold mine (or silver mine), in your country.
A clever trick you could use is to require that people pay you taxes in gold (or silver). Then you pay your soldiers in little circles of gold (or silver). You’re not a sophisticated society that can create paper money, but gold is hard to fake.
Now people will sell food to your soldiers for gold, so they can pay their taxes, and trade among one another with the same coins. Soon everyone just thinks gold = wealth.
It would be hard to do this with other substances. Gems are too rare and too varied in quality. Other metals are too common for you to get a monopoly on, or too useful to industry to waste on coinage.
This isn’t how everyone did it. Gold wasn’t really a currency among the Aztecs, for example, but it was treated as a sacred metal, probably because it was pretty and it never rusted.
Latest Answers