I was and am still really confused by gold. Why do people buy it? It’s literally a useless metal unless you want to create an inert surface or if you want to wire circuits. Just like Lenin said, gold is good for building toilets, or it may not even be good for that as silver is more bacterial resistant than gold.

One of my friend still lives in village and makes trips to Chennai every year, and gold is his purchase too. I asked him why he buys it regularly, and what he said baffled me. He said women think gold is beautiful. What? I couldn’t believe it. It’s such a negative investment, and people do it just because someone feels it’s beautiful? It defied all my senses, but he held to his point. He didn’t claim what he said was logical, but his claim was he is okay with the continuation of peace in his family despite the high financial burden that he had to endure.

I really felt sorry for him. For a person who thinks, I just have a question. There are plenty of ways to create more money from money. Let’s say you buy pure 24-carat gold, can you trade it the next year and buy even more gold? Think people think. Life is not about amassing stuff you want like crazy till you die. I feel life is, say if you have 200 hours of free time the last year, you must have at least 220 hours of quality free time this year. It should compound at the rate of 10 percent till one day you are so much financially interdependent that there is no need to work. You may work, but you do it because you want to, but not because you have to.

If you are not achieving that goal, I truly feel one is a fool.

Arguing from the point of science

Once people felt insulted in Napoleon’s dining table when their cutlery was not made with most expensive metal of that time. Today we call that metal Aluminum. Today it’s used to make utensils for prisoners because it’s so cheap. Gold is like that.

We humans at the max only mined down to a kilometer under the Earth. Gold is denser, as our tech improves, robots can go further down and bring us more gold. We will park asteroids in our orbit which contains more gold than mined ever by humanity. Engineered bacteria and nanobots will concentrate out gold from seawater.

It’s only a matter of decades or at max a century that gold becomes plentiful and worthless.