Zimbabwe Launches Gold Coins as Legal Tender To Tackle Hyperinflation (sky.com) 103
Zimbabwe has launched new gold coins to be sold to the public in a bid to tackle chronic hyperinflation. From a report: The gold coins - called Mosi-oa-Tunya - will have "liquid asset status", meaning they can be converted to cash, traded locally and internationally, and used for transactions, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe said. People can only trade the coins for cash after holding them for at least 180 days. Zimbabwean economist Prosper Chitambara said: "The government is trying to moderate the very high demand for the US dollar because this high demand is not being matched by supply." According to the International Monetary Fund, inflation in Zimbabwe reached 837% (year on year) in July 2020 and, although tighter fiscal policy helped reduce it to 60.7% by the end of last year, it remains in the high double-digits. This wipes away the value of people's savings - many people saw their savings wiped out by the 5 billion per cent inflation seen in 2008, according to the IMF.
5 Billion percent (Score:2)
The mind boggles. And yet, if I understand such things correctly, still not the worst the world has ever seen.
Not merely that. (Score:4, Informative)
They disowned (and often enough, killed) the white farmers who knew how to run a farming business and "reformed" the ownership toward party cronies (what, you thought they'd re-allot the land fairly to all?) who had neither the inclination nor the knowledge to make this here farming thing work.
Bread-basket to basket-case. I don't think a few gold coins is going to get them out of Mobutu's legacy. It may well ruin the land further, with everyone+dog suddenly going for "small-scale mining" much moreso than before. Which usually means unhealthy and environmentally-unfriendly methods. As is happening in other desperate places around the world.
Good question (Score:1)
In this case s/Mobutu/Mugabe/g and that really is typo, or well, a brainfart.
Tangentially, on the day he finally died I stumbled on a thirty year old newspaper with a two-page spread declaring that Mugabe had become irrelevant. Managed to wreck the country good in his irrelevant years, eh.
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Re:Not merely that. (Score:4, Informative)
Except it is 100% true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
These were farmers with paid local workers, not plantations with slaves. The local workers were also forced off the land and murdered. You are completely wrong. Stop spreading your racist nonsense.Facts are facts.
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Funny as long as you don't think too hard (Score:1)
There wasn't any outside punishment needed. The white farmers had become the mainstay of the economy. So to get rid of them was equivalent to get rid of the heart of their economy, ripped out just like that. Heart transplants can be a bit tricky in the best of cases.
Look, I get that the situation wasn't fair: A small group of people owning most of the arable land. And oh noes, they were white. But they also made it productive, and that just didn't happen after the "failed land reforms", as wikipedia euphem
Re:5 Billion percent (Score:4, Insightful)
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The mind boggles. And yet, if I understand such things correctly, still not the worst the world has ever seen.
A friend showed me a Zimbawe Billion dollar bill this past weekend. Finally, a way for the common man to enter the ranks of Bezos, et al.
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The mind boggles. And yet, if I understand such things correctly, still not the worst the world has ever seen.
A friend showed me a Zimbawe Billion dollar bill this past weekend. Finally, a way for the common man to enter the ranks of Bezos, et al.
With that and a 10 USD note he could buy a coffee at Starbucks, right?
Okay... (Score:2)
and if I were a Zimbabwean citizen who got a hold of one of these gold coins, what precisely stops me from trading it for US dollars across the border tomorrow instead of after the out-of-someone's-ass waiting period?
Also...where exactly are they going to get the gold to mint these coins? Very few commodity traders accept itchy and scratchy dollars.
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The biggest challenge is not selling the coins, but buying them. With a ~$1800 purchase price this is far beyond what a common person in Zimbabwe can afford.
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Note that what happened in Zimbabwe can happen anywhere when you have a government that is not for the people but for themselves. People in Zimbabwe with foreign assets were fine. I am suggesting get some foreign assets if you want to protect yourselves from your local gove
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That kind of defeats the purpose.
What defeats what purpose? Using gold and silver as money is fine. It's been done for thousands of years. It doesn't matter what shape you smash it into.
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> Also...where exactly are they going to get the gold to mint these coins?
https://miningzimbabwe.com/gol... [miningzimbabwe.com]
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You have that backward. Countries have consistently moved their currencies off gold and onto fiat because it was "supposed to be magical and fix everything".
The problem with gold-backed currency (Representative Money) is that it impedes the fiscal magic of banks by putting a hard cap on the total money pool - there is not an unlimited quantity of gold on earth and mining does not keep up with the rate of money creation.
The problem with Fiat Money is that it has no intrinsic value, so it requires a religious
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You have that backward. Countries have consistently moved their currencies off gold and onto fiat because it was "supposed to be magical and fix everything".
BS. Countries moved off gold because the amount of gold remains relatively constant yet the value of the economy increases. If counties remained on the gold standard, either the economies would fail to grow or the value of gold would quickly inflate beyond anything sustainable. For a current example of this, look at Bitcoin.
The problem with Fiat Money is that it has no intrinsic value, so it requires a religious leap of faith that it has a reasonably stable value.
Learn economics. And the theory of money. Fiat money has no value because it represents an concept called economic value, and the value it represents is set by the economy. If the econo
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Those coins were all backed by the metal (gold, silver, bronze) they were minted from, and best of all: No government to slyly debase the coins. Bit of a conceit to put that forward as proof a fiat-backed currency won't go down with the fiat-saying government.
Slyly debase no, you will always get caught, but debase the currency they will. Henry the VIII was infamous for it with his Great Debasement [wikipedia.org].
The interesting thing is that gold, silver, etc pretty much have little intrinsic value in terms of their industrial uses. Their value is pretty much down to tradition and the fact we agree they're valuable. If humans stopped thinking gold was valuable it'd just be a nice shiny metal. Yes it is a nice property that whatever token we agree to use is fixed in quantity a
Re: Okay... (Score:1)
This is grade A bullshit.
Google and read for free at least a few chapters of *what has government done to our money?* By Rothbard.
He explains WHY gold works.
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That's not really a salient argument about why you think what I said isn't true but instead an appeal to authority.
Incidentally I'm curious as to what your solution would be to population size changes if you had a currency based off a fixed quantity asset? I'm not saying there isn't one. It is just a bit unfortunate when people think a particular solution to a problem is absolutely flawless and can't stand to see any criticism of it.
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Are you seriously asking us to believe that the "ongoing mining" and "new gold deposits" could somehow magically account for the global economy, which has exploded in the past 100 years? Especially when the "new gold deposits" are producing gold at, literally, grams per ton of rock?
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My point was clear which is related to why and who benefits from inflation which is the key to being off the gold standard. But in taking the currency off the gold standard in 1971 it was the US dollar and other countries currencies were related to the US dollar, and still are so the separation from the gold standard was done by the US and other currencies were
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And then the Great Depression hit. People hoarded gold instead of depositing it in banks, which created an international gold shortage. Countries around the world basically ran out of supply and were forced off the gold standard.
Undersupply of currency causes issues no matter what.
Even in "good times", when there's a limited supply of gold, no one wants to spend it. No one wants to invest. Imagine if we were on gold before the iPod came out. Why would Apple go to the trouble of creating the iPod market, leading to the iPhone and iPad, worth trillions of dollars that weren't there before, when they know that only the rich would spend the gold on a luxury-priced item?
Gold i
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Re: Okay... (Score:1)
You sir have understood nothing from OP's post.
You should be eligible to get your economics degree fee refunded
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Wasn't gold supposed to be magical and fix everything because it's not fiat money?
Gold is like the second string quarterback on the football team. The most valuable person on the team.
The problem with Gold is that there just isn't enough of it. Want to see hyperinflation? go back to a true gold standard. Eventually, people will be spending millions of dollars for a molecule of gold. It will end up kinda like crypto.
The fact that gold has a use is irrelevant, except for the uses which actually require gold. Those will be priced out of existence.
Fiat is used as a pejorative, but it
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Fiat is used as a pejorative, but it's a major misunderstanding by those who use it that way. What modern money and control of it is, is acting as a indicator of stability of the government that issues it.
When managed well, fiat currency is better than gold, because with fiat, the managers can match the money supply to the needs of the economy.
The drawback to fiat currency is that it's too tempting to abuse it, like Zimbabwe does. In that case, the gold standard is better.
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or like the USA. Face it, creating $2.2T because the President wants to look good come election time is, and has always been, a really bad idea.
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Surprisingly, it also didn't seem to work.
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"The drawback to fiat currency is that it's too tempting to abuse it, like Zimbabwe does. In that case, the gold standard is better."
This is not actually a problem unique to fiat currency. Specie can also cause abrupt changes in monetary supply.
The Spanish Empire extracted so much silver from their New World mines that they caused inflation throughout Europe. This led to the bankruptcy of Spain and the abdication of Charles V, dividing the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs.
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Yeap. Similarly when the cyanide gold purification process was discovered in the late 1800s. The difference is that fiat currency can be infinitely inflated.
Re:Okay...The reason Gold is used (Score:1)
There are a lot of different opinions and definitions of what money actually is. But here's my take on why gold in particular has been used as money.
In ancient times gold was attractive for use as jewelry and rare, so it had value in the minds of people. Since it was also durable, portable, and hard to counterfeit. and also easy to divide and measure in precise quantities, it started getting used as money. Tradition did the rest.
This is, in a way, how money got invented. And money's qualities are partly
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That's part of it. It ignores the role of the government, Darius treasury department in this case, of establishing a standard of purity, and also that many other things, like bronze, have also been used as monetary materials. (I'd say metals, but there have been cases when, e.g., wood, was used as a monetary material.) These were ALL fiat currencies, including Darius' gold ingots.
OTOH, there's the case of the silver miner in Nevada who "counterfeited" silver dollars. The treasury department investigated
Re: Okay... (Score:1)
What does this accomplish? (Score:3)
I don't understand what this is supposed to accomplish. They aren't saying that the Zimbabwe dollar will be backed by gold, but literally making gold into currency. Thus the coin has intrinsic value which has nothing to do with the Zimbabwe dollar. So both the buying and selling price of the coin in Zimbabwe dollars will be based on the current value of the Zimbabwe dollar at the time it is bought or sold. That doesn't seem to accomplish anything at all.
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I think there is value here, but how small will their gold coins be if regular workers are going to access them?
Turn their ZDollar into gold today, so that in 180+ days they will have value not effected by inflation. A way to save in another currency not in a ZDollar bank account; where the ZDollar bank account will become worthless.
Also a way to change their currency that doesn't involve buying and holding big physical items (real estate/etc).
Might be better to give them a way to access currency exchange
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I think there is value here, but how small will their gold coins be if regular workers are going to access them?
Turn their ZDollar into gold today, so that in 180+ days they will have value not effected by inflation.
Hmm - Gold is not affected by inflation?
I agree (Score:1)
I don't see this helping the economy, except for maybe more foreign money coming in to buy the coins... but it doens't help improve the value of the currency.
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Oh, you don't see this helping? Well, that certainly changes everything ::eyeroll::
Do you think you're an expect on economics now, Apple shill?
it doens't help improve the value of the currency
That's not what it's for, dumbass. The idea is that it's a safer way for them to store wealth. Inflation wipes out debt, but it also wipes out savings. Ben Franklin was wrong about that penny saved bullshit. Gold might not be the best place to store wealth, despite what Glenn Beck told you, but it's better than a rapidly inflating currency.
Alice and Bob each hav
Queue Meme (Score:1)
Do you think you're an expect on economics now, Apple shill?
Always has been.
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I don't understand what this is supposed to accomplish.
It's likely a sign of a government that is insolvent, making a last-ditch effort to hold things together by tricking people. (Note that inflation is also an attempt to hold things together by tricking people.)
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I wouldn't trust the gold to be visible without a microscope. You'd need to look carefully to see a US dollar's worth of gold. As of today gold is US$1,720.00/ounce.
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I think its supposed to provide inflation resistant form of keeping money for the rich, so that they grab less paper USD from local market and thus helping with foreign currency deficit.
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Plausible deniability for pocketing some money, the insiders have preferential access to the coins and they are priced to allow them to make a profit.
Plain old corruption can get you in trouble once you want to spend it abroad.
Re: What does this accomplish? (Score:2)
Re: What does this accomplish? (Score:1)
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Why are people here so ignorant? This is common in collapsing countries.
Most of us are living in a collapsing country for the first time...
Cue ingenious people falsifying in 3-2-1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Falsifying gold coins is not that hard, there are three ways to do it:
An inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin coat of gold to provide reactivity to gold detecting chemicals.
If you are brazen, an inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin layer of Pyrite (fool's gold) to give the apearance.
If you want to be extra-delicate, an inner shell of tungsten, surrounded by a thin layer of gold, to not only give the propper chemical reactions, but also to make it extra difficult to detect falsifications by use of X-rays.
Getting the molds is not too diffiicult, either by crook (bribing someone at the mint), or by ingenuity (making your own), more so with modern tools, that even small organized crime gangs can easily get. Getting the raw materials and the fab equipment is not hard either.
Certainly is harder than falsifying papaer bills, but doable, and in a country like zimbawe, ripe for abuse.
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Would that pass being tossed on a scale though? Gold has a density of 19.42 g/cm^3, while lead is "only" 11.34 g/cm^3. If it were the other way around it would be simple enough to include lighter filler metals in the alloy, but elements more dense than gold are also quite a bit more expensive than gold.
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Tungsten is also hard. You can often bend gold with your bare hands, and lead would put up a similar amount of resistance and show a similar amount of plasticity. But tungsten most certainly would not. So you could probably just bite a coin and detect tungsten.
Re:Cue ingenious people falsifying in 3-2-1 (Score:5, Informative)
According to my 66th edition of The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Gold has a density of 19.31, lead has a density of 11.34 and Tungsten has a density of 19.35.
A gold plated lead coin probably wouldn't even pass a "heft" test from a human familiar with gold coins, much less a scale.
A gold plated tungsten-alloy could probably be made with exactly the same density as whatever alloy the gold coin in question is, but it would be extremely difficult to make a coin that had the right density, sounded right when you dropped on a hard surface, and had the same dielectric constant -- all things easy to measure cheaply.
I wouldn't be surprised if a plastic beam balance with a coin-sized slot cut into it became as ubiquitous as those counterfeit detecting pens.
But then, I've seen counterfeit bills that were so bad that one wonders how anyone could be fooled by them, so I'm sure counterfeit gold coins will be made too.
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Back when Sovereigns were commonly used, shop keepers etc did have simple scales with slots and diameters to cover half and full Sovereigns.
Not so much for counterfeits, which were easy to spot, as for light coinage. Gold is pretty shitty as circulating money, it wears quick and people will clip it (remove a bit from the rim). At that the British mint was continuously taking worn light coins and melting them down for new ones of the correct weight.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sove... [duckduckgo.com]
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An inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin coat of gold to provide reactivity to gold detecting chemicals.
Not likely to work. Have you ever felt the weight of lead vs gold? Sure, lead is heavy, but for a given volume, gold is WAY heavier.
If you are brazen, an inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin layer of Pyrite (fool's gold) to give the apearance.
LOL. Are you serious? Pyrite doesn't even look the right color to be gold. It's shiny and that's about as good as it gets. Only people who have never seen a genuine gold bar are going to take a look at pyrite and wonder if it's gold.
If you want to be extra-delicate, an inner shell of tungsten, surrounded by a thin layer of gold, to not only give the propper chemical reactions, but also to make it extra difficult to detect falsifications by use of X-rays.
Won't pass the bite test. Gold is a pretty soft metal. Tungsten is incredibly hard.
Easy to detect forgeries, 1-2-3 (Score:2)
The 'ping test' works for both gold and silver coinage, and a trained ear can often determine purity from the sound quality alone.
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I'm sure there's a legitimate case to be made here, but I would not personally base any significant decision on this evaluation. "Trained ears" can age and get tinitus. Frequency detection is impacted by, among other things, blood pressure.
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Falsifying gold coins is not that hard, there are three ways to do it:
An inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin coat of gold to provide reactivity to gold detecting chemicals.
If you are brazen, an inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin layer of Pyrite (fool's gold) to give the apearance.
If you want to be extra-delicate, an inner shell of tungsten, surrounded by a thin layer of gold, to not only give the propper chemical reactions, but also to make it extra difficult to detect falsifications by use of X-rays.
Getting the molds is not too diffiicult, either by crook (bribing someone at the mint), or by ingenuity (making your own), more so with modern tools, that even small organized crime gangs can easily get. Getting the raw materials and the fab equipment is not hard either.
Certainly is harder than falsifying papaer bills, but doable, and in a country like zimbawe, ripe for abuse.
And which of these would pass the ancient test of biting the coin and attempting to bend it against your teeth?
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Falsifying gold coins is not that hard, there are three ways to do it:
An inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin coat of gold to provide reactivity to gold detecting chemicals.
If you are brazen, an inner shell of lead, surrounded by a thin layer of Pyrite (fool's gold) to give the apearance.
If you want to be extra-delicate, an inner shell of tungsten, surrounded by a thin layer of gold, to not only give the propper chemical reactions, but also to make it extra difficult to detect falsifications by use of X-rays.
Getting the molds is not too diffiicult, either by crook (bribing someone at the mint), or by ingenuity (making your own), more so with modern tools, that even small organized crime gangs can easily get. Getting the raw materials and the fab equipment is not hard either.
Certainly is harder than falsifying papaer bills, but doable, and in a country like zimbawe, ripe for abuse.
And which of these would pass the ancient test of biting the coin and attempting to bend it against your teeth?
If your thin outer layer of gold is thick enough (pun intended), all the methods work.
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Except pyrite, which is more brittle than gold and won't yield to the teeth the same way.
I am less out-of-my-ass confident that the tungsten shell and interestingly this chart of density and cost [researchgate.net] for materials suggests that tungsten is denser than gold, so you could make up for the lead's under-spec density with tungsten. Who knows whether the acoustics match, though?
This is fun and all, but the "Is it really a piece of Zimbabwean gold currency?" question is moot as soon as their inflation inevitably makes
A few good ways to check (Score:2)
Falsifying gold coins is not that hard
While that is true, there are several really effective ways to check:
1) Ping test. This may sound odd, but it's actually quite good - gold (and silver) have a very specific resonance that can be detected either by ear, or even by applications. If you introduce other metals anywhere, it just does not resonate the same.
2) Weight/Size. Even a cheap scale can be accurate enough to see if a coin weighs exactly what a real coin should weigh, and cheap calipers can confirm
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Eureka! (Score:1)
Not only was specific gravity discovered by Archimedes [nde-ed.org], but supposedly the discovery of such is also the origin of the widely used term "Eureka!" (though it's just "I have found it!" in Greek).
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Be thankful for the invention of the light bulb. Or our symbol for sudden inspiration would be a naked old guy jumping out of a bathtub.
Re: Cue ingenious people falsifying in 3-2-1 (Score:2)
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That's a lot of work to make something that is far, far too light to fool anyone.
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Falsifying gold coins is not that hard
I challenge you to make one, then try doing it for less than the cost of a real coin. This isn't something the average Joe is going to do in his garage. It takes a lot of specialized knowledge and skill and it's still very high-risk.
It's actually pretty easy to detect fake gold coins, or fake gold anything. We tell children the story of Archimedes, for goodness sake. This is a long-solved problem.
You could try shaving a little bit from a lot of coins, which I understand used to be pretty common and one
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Clipping used to be pretty common, both silver and gold coins. Might only be a couple of pennies of gold but a penny was a lot more money then.
Shop keepers used things like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sove... [duckduckgo.com] and it was considered treason which came with a painful death sentence.
Also remember that gold coins wear pretty quick so even without clipping you had to watch for light coins.
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Falsifying gold coins is not that hard
I challenge you to make one, then try doing it for less than the cost of a real coin. This isn't something the average Joe is going to do in his garage. It takes a lot of specialized knowledge and skill and it's still very high-risk.
I am not part of any "small organized crime gangs" (you seem to have not read that part of the original post), so no. I, by my lonesome, can not make one.
It's actually pretty easy to detect fake gold coins, or fake gold anything. We tell children the story of Archimedes, for goodness sake. This is a long-solved problem.
Tell that to the average Zimbabwe citizen:
Education expenditures
3.6% of GDP (2018 est.)
country comparison to the world: 122
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
total: 11 years
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-... [cia.gov]
You could try shaving a little bit from a lot of coins, which I understand used to be pretty common and one of the reasons coins that some coins have ridges along edge, but this isn't easy either. Shave too much and you're caught, shave too little and it's not worth the effort. You also need a lot of coins to make just one new one. If you try to pass a bunch of shaved coins at once, which you'd want to do, the difference in weight will get you caught. Still, good luck trying to mint a new coin from your shavings! It's not an easy, so I'd expect any cheater to do something simpler, like make jewelry.
That's why small organized crime groups buy gold and tungsten, and make falsified coins, instead of shaving.
You can be sure that any country that's using gold coins will figure out not just ways to cheat, but how to catch cheaters very quickly.
I agree 100%, but I am n
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The lead idea is stupid. Lead is lighter than gold, so even Archimedes was able to detect that cheap trick 2500 years ago. Our ancestors have been trading with gold for millennia and you think it's recent to try to fake it? Tungsten is the only economically viable substitute, but it lacks the electrical properties of gold meaning it would be discovered simply by using a device that can check for conductivity at multiple points on the coin. In other words, since tungsten is the only metal cheaper than gold t
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I think that would end rather poorly for the counterfeiter. As in machete justice.
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I think that would end rather poorly for the counterfeiter. As in machete justice.
True
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Gee, Yogi... (Score:2)
I have some of the 100 trillion$ bills (Score:1)
That's what has been missing (Score:2)
Inflation Problems (Score:2)
2) wasted resources negotiating - companies constantly have to haggle new prices. 60% inflation in a business with a 5% margin means setting new prices at least every 2 weeks (when prices change by 2.5%)
3) need for immediate payment - If we negotiate a price, you need to complete payment
Ponzi scheme (Score:3)
Oh great, now they're hyping gold. Put all your money into gold, and then realize how many supernovas and neutron star collisions are out there, nucleosynthesizing it (while also killing everybody within many AU). By the time governments outlaw supernovas, the price of stars will have doubled.
Just Say No to this bandwagon.
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...within many AU)....>
I saw what you did there.
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Um, yeah, I meant to do that! [looks around furtively]
Special case of... (Score:1)
The gold standard is a special case of a "currency board". This is where an independent bank is empowered in some way to fix the money supply. Currency boards, in some fashion, are how hyperinflation ends.
There are ideologues who claim that the mere existence of fiat currency causes hyperinflation, but this isn't the case. It's when the currency board (discipline) is broken that hyperinflation ensues. In can be caused by any number of things, usually war or politics but it's the breaking of fiscal dis
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Gold doesn't generate interest. If they were to convert fully to a gold backed currency, it would be closer to dollarization except less practical and requiring more trust that the gold certificates actually represent real gold.
Pegging? Try it, you'll like it. (Score:2)