Why Gold?

Here’s something remarkable: civilizations that never had contact with each other — ancient Egypt, the Aztec Empire, China under the Han dynasty — all independently arrived at the same conclusion. Gold is money.

That wasn’t a coincidence. It was logic.

Gold won out over every other material because it checked every box that good money requires. It doesn’t rust or decay — a gold coin buried for a thousand years comes out looking the same. It’s divisible into smaller pieces without losing value. It’s rare enough that you can’t simply find more of it whenever you need some. And crucially, it’s fungible — one gram of gold is identical to every other gram of gold, regardless of where it came from.

But perhaps the most important quality was this: gold supply grows slowly. Miners can extract only about 1-2% more gold per year globally. That predictability meant that a gold coin’s purchasing power remained relatively stable across decades and even centuries. People could save in gold and trust that it would still buy roughly the same things years later.

Contrast that with governments printing paper money. A printing press can run overnight and double the money supply. No mine can double the world’s gold supply overnight.

Scarcity, enforced by nature rather than by human promise, was gold’s superpower.

For thousands of years it worked. Then the 20th century happened — and governments found a way around it.

Tomorrow: what makes money truly good — and a simple test you can apply to anything.