@JoeBravo77 I am not trying to shit on people buying gold and silver but - while it may be a good personal store of value, it is a shit currency
the amount of metals in the world is fixed, the population and economic activity is not, and before the invention of nitrogen fertilizers a century ago this wasn't a problem because populations were constrained by the available food but the population has exploded and so what - each person would do business in grains of gold? wages would need to go ever down as the number of people went up?
also, different parts of the world have different productivities and so trying to use gold or silver as a world currency doesn't work
and fiat means inflation - which sounds bad but is the basis for fractional banking, without which nobody would be able to leverage tomorrow's profit to build plants today (with some serious problems)
and without dollars, the American Empire doesn't work and would have to rely on a more direct hard colony system to survive, or collapse making Americans as poor as any other random nation
@brigrammer It’s not a shit currency it can’t be destroyed by fire or water. Has real industrial use and can be traded with other countries to increase supply. Fiat is the death of your economy. Bitcoin is digital fiat.
@TenaciousGoat people confuse stores of wealth with currency - currency is used to facilitate trade, stores of wealth are a way to have something valuable that can be used for future economic activity
the fact that USD can be transferred and spent anywhere in the US functionally instantly, and prices are pure decimal numeric transitions, and don't require high levels of trust and security and transport means it is easy for people to buy and sell goods and services
physical gold and silver are shit at this, digital gold backed funds have a ton of problems fiat doesn't around fraud, conversion, etc. - and the volatility of gold prices means nobody is willing to write contracts in gold - gold isn't even fungible as it comes in grades and mintage
currency is how things are bought and sold and lent and made contracts in - stores are how value can be saved into the future
if you cannot unwrap the difference between these, go buy 100 dollars of gold and try to buy some groceries with it - good luck