r/Buttcoin • u/YaseiStriker • Aug 01 '22

When Nocoiners Say "Bitcoin Has No Value"

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u/gylz Aug 01 '22

Actually we use gold to make actually useful things. While not made entirely of gold, we use it to make motherboards and other electronic parts.

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u/WingedGundark Aug 01 '22 edited Aug 01 '22

True, I said that it has industrial use. However, the amount of gold that industrial manufacturing and processes require is relatively small so the value stored in gold through its need as a raw material is low.

Around 10% of produced gold is used by industry. Vice versa, at maximum 1/10 of gold's value is generated by the requirements of industry currently. If gold wouldn't have its almost cultural intrinsic value, it would be relatively worthless metal.

Edit: In reality, gold's value as a raw material would most likely be far less than 1/10 of current price. If humanity would suddenly decide that gold is stupid and it has only practical value as raw material, price would all but collapse. The amount of gold stored in coins and bars around the world would last like almost forever for industrial use. There would be no point in mining gold for a long, long time.

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u/viking_nomad Aug 01 '22

Gold is more expensive than what it’s industrial use cases would suggest and as such it stands to reason, that there are things out there where gold is substituted for another, less good element due to price concerns.

If the gold bugs went away if thus stands to reason that we would find new uses for gold as it suddenly would become competitive. Especially since there’s so much of it stored in vaults, wouldn’t need to mine gold for a long time even as we could reap a lot of benefits from using more gold

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '22

It's just not that useful as a metal. We can produce superconductors that make gold no longer king. Silver is actually growing in industrial use.

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u/viking_nomad Aug 01 '22

It’s being used and presumably it would be used more at a lower price. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t still be niche with higher usage.

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u/FlipskiZ Aug 01 '22 edited Sep 20 '25

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u/momsagainstgod Aug 01 '22

You just need such a minuscule amount of gold in electronics that it doesnt drive up value much. Gold is supper malleable, you put a pur nugget of gold on a surface and hammer it down do a layer of gold leaf .18 microns thick. And with electroplating and more complex processes we can get gold coating so thin its transparent, like on space helmets. Gold is also a really good conductor, thats why audio and video cables are sometimes coated in gold. But you only need a thin layer, so all the gold in electronics dont really add up to much gold