Gold wasn’t valuable because of jewelry 📿.
It was money first—and that’s why people wore it.
The popular tale says we loved shiny trinkets and then they became money. Sounds nice. But it’s backwards.
Gold beat other goods because it’s durable, divisible, verifiable, and highly value-dense. Crucially, its stock-to-flow is high: the total stock already above ground dwarfs the new annual supply, so new mining⛏️ barely dilutes holders. That’s why it worked so well for saving and exchange.
After gold became money, people did the obvious thing: they wore their savings. In many cultures, gold jewelry functions as a portable savings account—wealth you can carry, pledge, or pass down.
As Nick Szabo put it, early “collectibles” evolved into money because they were superb at storing and signaling value across time and groups. Jewelry followed money—not the other way around.
Myth busted: We didn’t prize gold due to ornaments. We made ornaments out of gold because it was already the best money 🪙.
#gold #investing #Bitcoin #SoundMoney #AustrianEconomics
