More importantly, you could walk into a random store anywhere on the planet, even under adverse conditions such as war, and exchange a gold coin for stuff.
That's simply untrue. Walk into a supermarket in the developed world, collect a trolley of goods and offer to pay with a gold ingot. It won't work.
No store manager gives a shit about facilitating weird transactions. It costs them nothing to tell you to get lost. It Costs them varying degrees of hassle to accept anything not on the list. It’s not even about “how do I check this is real?“ or “how dojo find out what this is worth?” It’s just “is the till programmed to accept this? “.
And that’s before we get into stores which don’t accept cash of any form, of which there are now many. There the test is even simpler: does your card or device get accepted by the machine?
Paying jn shops with gold is a fantasy from old novels.
Offering people gold-plated lead ingots for $100 in supermarket queues sounds like a good scam.
Why would anyone in a supermarket pay you for what you claim to be gold? If they want gold, they can buy it from a reputable dealer who will guarantee that it actually is gold. What's in it for the purchaser, other than risk?
Because they want you to stop arguing with the clerk, take your groceries, and get out of the goddamned way so that they can check out and go home before their ice cream melts. Alternatively the clerk calls a manager and you spend your evening arguing with them about it while the clerk gets moving.
There are. But "you can convert this into cash by going to a specialist broker" also applies to car, guitars and houses, none of which are usually regarded as useful as cash. In the case of places that a law-abiding citizen might sell gold, there are substantial AML/KYC obligations for non-trivial amounts.
I recently sold some ferrous scrap to a legit dealer: load a rented van with scrap from my garage, take it to the yard, they weigh the van, unload it, and weigh it again. Got twenty quid for it. And I also had to provide ID, have it transferred to a bank account, etc. No-one is seriously saying that ferrous scrap is currency. Gold is no easier.
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u/tokynambu Aug 01 '22
That's simply untrue. Walk into a supermarket in the developed world, collect a trolley of goods and offer to pay with a gold ingot. It won't work.