Gold Could Be Done As A Store Of Value Within The Next 100 Years

Introduction

Humanity has created forms of money to facilitate trade and to store value since time immemorial. The exact form of money used by each culture has always been a function of the level of technological sophistication of that culture.

The most important quality of money is its salability across time and space. For that, a form of money has to be

durable
recognizable
scarce
impossible to counterfeit
divisible
fungible (one unit is equal to any other)
have inelastic supply (if demand increases supply is hard to increase)

Even primitive cultures have used forms of money to fulfill the basic roles of money, which are:

store of value
medium of exchange
measure of value

Typically, primitive cultures have used rare types of seashells or stones or processed skins of animals that are hard to capture or things of that nature. On one Polynesian island, large and practically immobile blocks of stones called Rai stones were used as stores of value. The people of that island used an accounting system to keep track of who owned how much of the stones. But the basis of their monetary system were the stones which were scarce and impossible to steal.

Typically, encountering a more advanced civilization in possession of the means to overproduce the form of money used by a primitive culture led to the erosion of the value and thus usefulness of their form of money.

Along with the invention of metallurgy, ancient agricultural civilizations adopted gold and silver as the basis of their monetary systems across the world.

Exponential gains in technology will likely make gold abundant in the next 100 years

_{By Astronomical Institute of the Charles University: Josef Ďurech, Vojtěch Sidorin - http://astro.troja.mff.cuni.cz/projects/asteroids3D/web.php?page=db_asteroid_detail&asteroid_id=109, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32199126}

Gold is a rare noble metal - that is, rare on Earth and using current mining techniques. 16 Psyche is an asteroid orbiting the Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that is estimated to contain $10,000 quadrillion worth of minerals including vast quantities of gold. NASA is planning to send a probe to 16 Psyche in 2022.

While bringing the asteroid back to Earth is impossible and the mining technology to exploit it does not exist, it could be used in the colonization of space in the future. If 16 Psyche and other asteroids are mined in the future, side streams of minerals could be dropped to the Earth. It's possible to decelerate the shipments using the gravity of the Sun and the planets. Technology required to profitably mined the seabed or the seawater itself could be improved to make them competitive.

Conclusion

It's possible that the advancement of technology could make gold worthless as a store of value in the next 100 years just like technology used by more advanced civilizations has made stores of value used by less advanced civilizations worthless.

Computational power will always be scarce, which means that a synthetic form of scarcity (=store of value) could replace precious metals over the long term.

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