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0 pointsdnautics10y ago0 comments

There's a lot of things you can do that are even sometimes better for your well-being. Buying gold, for example, can be a relatively safe hedge against unemployment (and even science-fiction-level economic collapse).

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goblin8910y ago· 2 in thread

Honest question: how does one buy currency with gold even under current circumstances? Let’s even forget the doomsday for a moment.

OP mentions gold as safe non-crazy way to protect savings against long-term inflation and depressions. However, from what I understand, any outsider would be extremely lucky to sell it at a rate anything close to the market, and common sense suggests that if dollar plunges it’d become proportionately trickier.

If selling it isn’t as tricky as it seems, then the reverse question comes up: how to buy it now without being ripped off?

hackercomplex10y ago

I think your confused about gold. Any coin shop or pawn shop in America will give you close to spot price in USD for the yellow metal. You don't even need to show ID.

The hard part has been.. how do you buy or sell or pay with gold electronically while having a convenient audit trail so that it's not a time consuming process to file your taxes, but that's also solved thanks to a startup founded in part by a senior paypal exec: https://www.bitgold.com/

dnauticsOP10y ago

Gold is used as carrying currency in places like zimbabwe where the official currency is too unreliable. People directly measure out quantities and weigh them, like in mining days but with more accuracy (digital scales). Presumably other forms of exchange are used for smaller denominations (goods for barter etc)

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