Why does Gold have value?

Zakiya

Why is gold valuable? Gold is rare, doesn’t rust or break easily, and has been used for thousands of years as money and a way to store wealth. People trust it because it holds its value over time and is seen as special across cultures and countries.

Steven_Haddock

One of the reasons gold became a store of value was the ease in assaying it, that is, determining its purity.

Gold is usually alloyed with another metal because in its pure form it’s very soft. For example, 24K gold usually contains just a touch of copper to keep you from being able to bend the gold with your hands. 18K is usually more common for gold objects because it has a better wear characteristics. However, for coins or bullion, you want it about 99.99% pure.

Now, you can assay gold by melting it (gold is so dense the molten gold falls to the bottom) but that’s expensive and time consuming. Its fine if you’re running a mint to purify gold in this manner (and we still do that today when we take broken jewelry to turn into bullion), but in most cases you don’t want to take the time or energy.

This is where this comes in
https://www.mineralminers.com/images/tourmaline-black/crystals/tbkm654-black-tourmaline-crystal-specimen.jpg

This is black tourmaline, a mineral made up of boron, silicon and maybe some aluminum, iron, magnesium, sodium and lithium. It’s pretty on its own, but the ancients found it had a much more valuable property
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-62b5c4d0ffd790c8c1e56f22eb7724d1-pjlq

When you rub a piece of gold against it, the colour of the scratch correlates with the purity of the gold. Cheap, instant, irrefutable and mostly non-destructive.

Julia_Abenes

Other from the fact that everyone seem to agree that Gold is valuable, gold is a pretty scarce metal.Scarcity also determines the value of a particular item, like a baseball card. A baseball card can be just as valuable as an ounce of gold but lets look at other characteristics which makes gold valuable.

Gold is not only a precious metal and is not only rare, but it also has many attractive properties. It's a good conductor for heat and electricity. It's not affected by heat, moisture, oxygen, and other corrosive agents. It's used in jewelry, and other prizes people sought after the most like 1st place in competitions and especially the Olympics.

And on top of this, Gold is an all purpose metal. It's used in health, dentistry, electronics and chemistry. There is probably about 10 grams of gold being used in your computer to cell phone alone. These are reasons why gold is considered a Commodity and why Gold is considered a very precious and valuable metal.

Sandy_Patterson

It’s fluctuated extremely just within the last 50 years. Thousands of years ago, it was less valuable than salt. That said, the value of gold is as a marker, a signifier of work. Gold has never been easy to obtain, and is one of the easiest metals to work. I’m not sure quite how to articulate what I’d like to explain, but basically the difficulty of obtaining gold gave it a value because it represented a certain amount of labor, and was more portable than a product that represents a similar amount of labor. Say for example that a cow hide is worth 5% of the cost of a cow, and a cow goes for one piece of gold. So the cowhide would sell for .05 gold pieces. If you take that same cow hide and turn it into parchment you might be able to sell it for .10 or .15 pieces of gold because it required a certain amount of labor to do it. The gold itself has no intrinsic value, merely the labor it represents. This has continued into modern money markets and somewhat departed from historical norms, but the concept is still the same. In practical terms, gold is practically worthless. You can’t eat it, make a knife out of it, cook in it, or make tools out of it. HOW it came to be agreed upon as a standard medium of exchange is a much more interesting question.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8365f1dc5f33dd2093149b6f75333921-lq

EDIT: Maybe the best way to think of the value of gold is as a poker chip. Since it requires a certain amount of work to get enough gold to be a “chip” there’s no real way to counterfeit it. If you do enough work as a carpenter or farmer, or painter or mason you can trade that work for a certain amount gold. If you do enough work as a miner you collect a certain amount of gold. Regardless, it’s all still work, and you can’t fake it. There’s STILL no effective way to counterfeit gold.