Financial Cryptography

Silly banker. He says you can't spend gold anywhere. Incorrect. Of course you can. I do. And you could spend it a lot more places if the people in government would stop fighting it with guns as they have for about 80 years now.

Also, if you want to buy something from a merchant who doesn't accept gold, that's simple. Trade the gold for something the merchant does accept.

Also, to say that gold is useless except for being shiny is like saying paper money is useless except for wiping your ass. In point of fact, they are both useful, as instruments of trade.

Also, to say that paper money is better because it's "legal tender" is pretty silly too. People can settle debts trades in any way they like -- nobody is required to use paper money issued by some single authority. It's just that if you use anything but legal tender, and you have a dispute, you cannot bring that dispute to a government court. Well, use an arbitration service instead. Government courts suck anyway.

Silly vapid people say that gold is useless because you can't eat it. But you can't eat paper money either. So that observation is completely pointless.

They also say gold is useless because you can't make anything out of it. Of course that is completely false, since jewelry, electronics, and dental work use gold directly. I would argue that paper money is useless because you can't make anything out of it. What are you gonna do, use it as wallpaper?

The banker in this video is like a parrot, mindlessly squawking exactly the sort of juvenile, ill-informed propaganda his masters want to hear. The goldbug is also doing a piss-poor job of justifying his desire. So this video is a silly little propaganda set-piece, trying to make the banker look like a wise man when in fact he's just as banal as the goldbug.

This is an absurdity, a real paranoid gold bug would never buy an ETF :-)

"It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."
-Warren Buffett

@TB: Even if a paranoid goldbug were willing to buy an ETF, he or she surely wouldn't buy one that holds unallocated metal. Sheesh! Silly teddy bear: read the prospectus.