I was wondering people's opinion on what would be the most frequently used and seen gold coins in a future scenario of fiat collapse and precious metals ruling as the most reliable form of currency to the common people. I wonder if people would mainly use silver for simple transactions and only use gold for larger purchases. Or maybe 1/10 oz coins would be popular. I don't think people would use 1/20 much. Would you rather have one 1oz or two 1/2s, maybe a few 1/4s...any oldschool D2 players here? I'm wondering what the SOJ of gold will be.
I would always accept 4x1/4 rather than 1x1oz coin. 10x1/10oz are OK too. 1/2oz is the biggest coin for my taste. Hard to sell to poor people.
If your looking at an end of the wield situation then I think collecting whatever is recognizable to the most people will be the go. That means local currency in gold. Sovereigns for instance don't have their gold content written on them, that's not a problem in commonwealth countries because enough people will recognise them and know the history to accept them. This is likely to be less true in the states for example where gold eagles are likely a better bet. Although your average person won't know you'd be surprised how quickly people will educate themselves if and when the population at large is forced to use them. Using gold rounds without weight and purity on them (like ducats/corona/peso) is tricky as it's hard to know if people will accept them or trust them. Even clearly marked ones might be suspect, will people accept that they are what they say just because it's written on there? In this sort of situation XRF and acid tests might be hard to find. I think institutional memory will lend some credibility to former government issued money. Even if all your dealing with is an end of fiat situation you will likely find gold to big to use for almost all transactions besides major purchases. The amount of gold you would spend to buy a couple days worth of food would be so small as to be impractical. People aren't going to like accepting tiny 1/20th or smaller coins and they are very expensive premium wise to buy now. Obviously a little gold is good, you might want to have some serious cash for some things but for day to day I think silver or long life trade/barter items would be the go. The best example would be pre industrial Europe, most people wouldn't see gold coins more than a few times in their lives and likely never owned more than one or two and in plenty of cases peasants never owned one. Gold was for government, churches, bankers, merchants and the aristocracy, only a few percent of the population would have known how and where to spend it. A handful of sliver was just as good as a few large gold coins when buying big things and way better at buying small things. In any case I think it's a fairly narrow set of circumstances that gold and silver will be useful in. If things go too badly all the gold in the world won't buy you food. It's really only a localized currency problems but not total economic collapse that this works in. Of course Russian stackers are probably feeling pretty clever right now. Perhaps one day a few ounces will buy you a house and an average PM stack will make you a local landlord or baron. In the meantime I'd look at it as an investment.
If things go badly, in any degree, from all kinds of money, fiatcurrencies are the first to get dumped, and recognizable precious metals as last. Murphy, and any1 that thinks abit, says it. If things go badly in a max degree, as that only basic stuff gets accepted as payment, then people have to barter with basic stuff. That's so crappy that it usually doesn't take long for a medium of exchange (read: money) to reappear. The least practical (precious metals) first, since people that come from only accepting basic stuff, tend to not accept less. And this way the climb back up on the welfare ladder proceeds, until a level that allows saving again, and the central planned theft can restart. And gold and silver differ enough from cheaper materials to allow a barebone verification with a degree of certainty that is acceptable in situation with nothing better. If things became so badly that all fiatcurrencies got dumped and people were thrown back to local trading, then I doubt Chinese and other fakery still gets imported. Remember what fakers did in the past. Clipping edges. Manipulating scales. Gold was indeed (and measured in quantity still is) the metal of choice for Parasites including State. They have big stocks gold and little stocks silver, they have a double presence in gold funds than silver funds. Gold is still more useful for people that lack the storage room or want to be mobile with it. Of course, mobility has its own risk, history is full of precious metal stories 'grabbed' on the road / sea. I don't expect situations that bad anyway. My intention to purchase precious metals was independence and own control, and my future intentions are directly using it as money. Some people directly yell "barter", but if you look at what people even nowadays often do: helping to get helped in return, paying some1 a beer to later get a beer in return. And any mix of favors and something at a moment for whatever something else at that moment. The sole drawback is that there is no proof of ownership, but when we buy stuff we use/consume ourselves, do we keep all the tickets? The (cheap?) ink they use vanishes after a couple months. In the shop they tell you to take a copy in case the guarantee is needed. Probably due to some govt regulation that requires biodegradable ink or so lol. At least, I'm gonna try. I do have some scenario's for my future and the silver has places in it. So I think questions like what's the most commonly used gold coin/weight, are pretty redundant. It doesn't make much difference, and people that want to have buyers for their stuff are very willing to find solutions. If you need a bread every day, and you only have a 1 ounce gold coin, then the baker can write a signed paper with a checkerboard pattern on it, that gets a stamp every day upon bread receival. People adapt to situations, and if trading delivers a benefit, then they will find solutions.
I think people that have a harvest won't have much chance on poverty. Historically, poverty among farmers was usually caused by loitering rather than trading.
I would second the advice of phrenzy - what people recognise. In Commonwealth countries, that would likely be a mix of sovereigns and 1oz gold items. I've personally bartered quite a bit with gold - I sold my vehicle to another forum member and was paid in 1oz gold bars - because I knew what it was and I would accept it. In other circumstances I've offered to pay with silver or gold for items, and gotten various responses from blank looks with "um, no thanks" to looks of outright incredulity. Alternatively, if a good deal of your savings are in gold, go for low premium, high demand items like 1oz gold bars - sell one at a time as you need to at your LBD where you're in good standing as a long time customer who gets to jump the queue ahead of the unknown walk-ins ( ), and draw down fiat as you need it at the value of the day. Most likely scenario in a fiat collapse? A new fiat within weeks, probably accompanied by strict currency controls, long queues, rationing and hyperinflation. In some SHTF Utopia where we're all down to trading ASEs for cans of beans, be the guy selling the beans, not buying them - accrue wealth instead of spending it. Use your gold to buy land, Omegas, Boyds, Falcon GTs... and come out the other side with hard assets that will appreciate. Where I am in Florida at the moment, a parallel can be drawn with the real estate bust from 2007-2010 - anyone that had dry powder in the form of cash has made an absolute killing buy up dirt cheap land and houses - but you had to have the cash (or gold) to do it, and be in a position where you weren't spending a dwindling supply of cash (or gold) on living and keeping your head above water. Now that there's a full on recovery in swing (evidenced by rising prices, new construction firms starting, the most new building permits issued since 2007 etc), those people are raking it in. That's one way of becoming a millionaire. Have the capital in place to capitalise on the bad times. Timing the buy is more valuable than timing the sell. Having to be rich to get rich was a bit of an issue, but it can be applied on a smaller scale. I do like cheap 1/10oz gold coins when I can get them though. About grocery bill sized.
The most commonly used gold coin? In Australia, many people would easily recognize the RAM 200 dollar Koala coin (1980 -1986). 22 carat gold 91.67% gold, 8.33% copper Weight - 10 grams Diam - 24mm Face value - $200 AUD http://www.australian-threepence.com/blog/2013/07/cute-australian-koala-coins.html
"In some SHTF Utopia where we're all down to trading ASEs for cans of beans, be the guy selling the beans, not buying them - accrue wealth instead of spending it. Use your gold to buy land, Omegas, Boyds, Falcon GTs... and come out the other side with hard assets that will appreciate." Why not just buy everything you might need in that situation now instead of buying PMs? Ideally you'd buy everything you need before buying PMs, but unless you have a lot of money, it would probably be easiest and safest to stock away PMs as you're accumulating real wealth in the process. If things get bad and you don't have the all the things you need, or the surplus supply of beans to sell to people, then your best asset is probably going to be the PMs that you bought at an earlier time, and hopefully (otherwise what's the point) the real value of those PMs, what it can get you, will have gone up in that time, maybe by a great deal. Unless that happens, you might have been better off just buying those items instead of buying PMs to use at a later date to get the same items.
Never mind I guess you're kinda saying the same thing just basically be careful how you spend your PMs when the time comes so that you're still increasing wealth, not just buying things. Well that was a waste of time. Time to go to sleep.
