amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
The problem with this thread is that I think a lot of people are hung up on the price of the gold today versus the liquor today. What if instead of one gold coin, it was a hundred gold coins? A thousand? Ten thousand?
Doomsday currency
- Thread starter Elta
- Start date
Well, you also have to factor in some other things, mainly the fact that although gold is seen as valuable today, it might not be in the future, considering how useless a metal it would be in a post-apocalyptic society.
Liquor on the other hand, is always valuable.
Loppan Torkel
Deity
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2004
- Messages
- 4,756
I have no guns to defend 800 bottles of liquor in a wardrobe and women will always like shiny things, so gold coin it is.
Floating Pants
Drunk on Life
Who the heck is gonna want precious metals after doomsday?? 
I think the point is that for one ounce of gold, you can buy a hundred bottles of decent (JD) liquor. So if you up it to a hundred gold coins, then we're talking 10,000 bottles of liquor. Obviously that's verging on impractical to store.*
So then at ten thousand ounces of gold ($16.5m), would you prefer the gold or would you prefer to buy something else like a rural farm that you could then build up into a defensible position, buy a cache of weapons and ammunition and buy up the ability to work the land?
*you could probably store it in a one bedroom apartment with room to move around. Assume, packed, the liquor takes up 25% of the volume of the packaging. For a 750ml bottle, that's 3 litres of space. Rounding, my living room is 12ft x 20ft x 8ft or 1920cubic feet or 54,000 litres. Thus I could store ~13,500 litres of alcohol or 18,000 bottles of Jack Daniels. Round down to 10k so I can keep my computer set up.
Elta
我不会把这种
^ This all day.
People waiting for "The to hit the fan" storing gold is effectively pointless, there are plenty of other things to store that will do you much better than gold.
People waiting for "The to hit the fan" storing gold is effectively pointless, there are plenty of other things to store that will do you much better than gold.
Can you really not think of any such event?
rugbyLEAGUEfan
Deity
I don't need no doomsday to opt for the booze
Abegweit
Anarchist trader
Are you the government?
Quackers
The Frog
I would go for a "basket" of doomesday currencies. Top of the list will definitely be gold in any form jewellery for instance. After that I think batteries, water sanitation tablets, painkillers, toothpaste, seeds, alcohol! I think I would get a lot of barter for batteries and painkillers imo ;p
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
It's still a good unit of account, medium of exchange and a store of value. Why wouldn't it be used? Especially if the perceived value of fiat money was decimated in the process.
What I meant was that some people were saying that because the bottles of liquor at their present market price are worth more than the single coin, they chose the liquor. It didn't really answer the question of: would, in some kind of post-doomsday society, liquor be a better medium of exchange than gold?
I'd take the gold, not because of its usefulness but because I'm not a rural-type person.
Not really. I can't conceive of why people would not want, in the event of a catastrophe, to rebuild and restart our industries. Why do you think there could be such a thing? What would cause people to want to become subsistence farmers?
LucyDuke
staring at the clock
Zombies, duh.
Society collapses due to whatever and results in us being below the break-even point for net-positive energy in fossile fuel extraction.
What next, how do we power stuff?
I will be once I take over your idyllic little town.
That may be true in the distant future after the apocalypse, when things stabilize a bit, and gold can be acquired in reasonable amounts as to actually make it a worthwhile currency.
But in the direct aftermath, people are going to put much higher value on useful commodities, metals such as iron and copper, food, weapons, etc., and so it would be wiser to stockpile those rather than gold.
Abegweit
Anarchist trader
Just try it.
On a separate, but relevant, issue... I really don't understand why statists have this need to glorify war and use it as some of refutation of decent folk.
Well, yeah, that's kinda the point.
You're idealistic little town, due to it's lack of any sort of overarching authority, is ripe for the picking by the people who do.
Because that's reality.
Still curious how one raises children in an anarchistic society.
Abegweit
Anarchist trader
Ummm. One gets married, then pregnant. Then "one" and her husband bring them up, Why does this need pointing out?
_random_
Jewel Runner
Doesn't a standard family unit qualify as a dictatorship?
Sounds like a dictatorship.
Similar threads
- Locked
- Poll
