Gold does not corrode, so it became a symbol of immortality and power in many ancient cultures. Its rarity and aesthetic qualities made it an ideal material for the ruling classes to demonstrate their power and position. In ancient times, the paltry amount of gold that governments and commercial companies could extract became idols, shrines and sacred objects. Later, rich men and officials began making vases, cups, plates and jewelry when there was abundance, but converting gold into currency or even investing in a Gold IRA was unheard of until 700 BC. C.
Damodice was responsible for producing the first gold coins, but Lydian merchants began to make it a popular practice. The first civilizations equated gold with the gods and rulers, and gold was sought in its name and dedicated to its glorification. Humans value gold almost intuitively, equating it with power, beauty and the cultural elite. And since gold is widely distributed around the world, we find this same thought about gold in all ancient and modern civilizations around the world.
There are still supporters of the gold standard, and many of them spoke out during the global financial crisis claiming, among other advantages, that the gold standard would create greater price stability than issuing fiat money based solely on trust. Going back a bit to 1848, a man named John Marshall found gold flakes in a California stream, thus starting the California Gold Rush. Gold was associated with water (that's logical, since most of it was found in streams), and gold was supposed to be a particularly dense combination of water and sunlight. Some have cited that another disadvantage of the gold standard is that countries with fewer reserves are at a significant disadvantage compared to those with more gold reserves.
The inability of governments to inflate the value of money because it is linked to the supply of gold makes it difficult for inflation to increase significantly, while a globally accepted gold standard sets exchange rates and reduces economic uncertainty. The gold standard gave people the assurance that the value of their money did not depend on their country's ability to pay debts, their international position or a thousand other things they didn't understand, but only on their ability to produce gold. All that said, this series of blog posts on gold will seek to explain why it is such a precious metal, making a story, discussing its properties, the extraction and production process, the uses of gold, the main gold-producing countries and, finally, explaining its role as a traded commodity. In 1871, a new international gold standard began when England and Germany officially adopted the gold standard and, by 1900, most developed countries had followed suit.
Since the end of the gold standard, the price and production of gold have skyrocketed worldwide and, along with that, so has demand. This is where the golden chemical symbol Au comes from to represent gold in the periodic table of elements. As gold became more entrenched in world currencies, many countries began to back their money with the amount of gold their country could produce. According to the gold standard, the money supply is directly linked to the supply of gold, which means that, during the First World War, many countries decided to temporarily suspend the gold standard in order to be able to print money to pay for their military participation in the war.
The process of colonization and globalization of other parts of the world by the developed world made new discoveries of gold commonplace and, with it, there was a large influx of supplies of this metal, making the gold standard prosperous. Gold prospecting was a global effort that dates back thousands of years, even before the first money in the form of gold coins appeared around 700 BC. C.
