Gold Is Something You Wear Around Your Neck

(This image is from Wikipedia.)

Good morning to you all,

Recently, I had two related conversations: one with my provider (basically an army commando whose job is to twist me into a dodecahedron), and one with my grandpa's friend. They were about how things, mainly currencies, are becoming more digital. Let me explain.

Throughout time, we've given and gotten things with value. When the settlers traded with Native Americans, both parties saw something they wanted, a physical object, and traded it for the physical object in their possession that the other person wanted. The settlers had guns. The Native Americans wanted guns. The Native Americans had pelts. The settlers wanted pelts. So, they exchanged their physical possessions.

Now, I don't think you're stupid. I'm explaining this because I have to make a simple point to explain a complex subject.

Pretty soon afterwards, people discovered gold. It was shiny and malleable, along with a whole host of other properties. Some people had it. Other people wanted it. So, products like corn were sold in exchange for bars of gold. Somebody would give somebody else the gold, and the other person would give them the corn. One person now had a physical ear of corn, and one person now had a physical gold bar. They both had value.

Fast forward to a little later. There was one problem. As people started to accumulate more gold, they needed to carry it. And gold, well, it was kinda heavy, even if you molded it into coins. So, somebody came up with the idea of a paper note that was representative of X amount of gold, to be exchanged at a later date. It was called a dollar: a paper note representative of physical monetary value, like a gold bar.

And then, people got tired of carrying around dollars (why?) and started carrying around checks, paper notes that represented paper notes that represented physical monetary value (gold bars).

And then, people got tired of checks, so they carried around credit cards, plastic cards that represented digital data that represented paper notes that represented something of physical monetary value (gold bars).

See where I'm going? Where is the physical gold bar behind the dollar, an originally purely representative currentcy medium. WHERE is the actual value?

And the bigger questions: Will credit cards be represented by something like its siblings were? Is this why our economy's failing?

I told my provider all of this, and she said the following:

"Gold is something you wear around your neck."

Do you believe this statement? Please comment if this struck a chord with you, whether you agree or disagree.

Think,
Tomato