What’s surprising to me is that cultures all across the world agreed that this shiny metal was valuable and could be readily exchanged anywhere for goods and services.
We know that gold is valuable today because of its distribution, availability and metallurgical properties. But random tribes who haven’t even seen an iron tool somehow decided that this shiny metal was scarce and valuable enough to hoard and desire.
It's shiny and very easy to work and doesn't rust. The complete opposite of iron, which didn't really become that widespread until the bronze age trade routes collapsed (tin and copper aren't found in the same place). Bronze was also a much nicer metal than iron back in those days. Much, much easier to work and about as strong.
I've felt that too. But then I wonder if this is a true feeling or if its just cultural training - countless stories have consistently told me that gold is valuable.
Gold can be easily melted to combine larger and smaller portions together or split them up. It is "inert" meaning does not easily react with anything else so you don't lose it too easily. It is a great store of value.
And think why does Bitcoin cost so much? Because of its scarcity.
Scarcity is actually an incredibly valuable property. Control over gold production meant control over the money supply. Otherwise, anyone could inflate your currency into oblivion.
Wait until you learn that banks can just make more money by increasing numeric values in databases. "Money supply" is very poorly understood in armchair denouncements of modern central banking.
So based on that I would say it was purely thanks to scarcity. Money is used to represent x human effort/time after all; it takes time to find the gold, then time to process it. But the same applies to various other weird currencies used in the world like seashells/beads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money#:~:text=Shell%20mo....
I feel like there's an intermediate step with these where seashells/beads/similar objects had cultural significance and therefore value because they had to be found (and sometimes worked into beads). It's a step from pure trading of useful items like a knife or an item of clothing to an intermediate currency like seashells, then to precious metals (which are still valuable even if melted down) to what we have now (currency as a symbol of trust that the currency is worth what it's worth as enforced by a government or some other system).
Have you never held or owned any gold? Its amazing. Its like really hard clay, but its metal, AND doesnt rust, its amazing! Its hard to understand the question to be honest, I mean, its GOLD!
Gold is both easy to work with and make finely detailed jewellery and is THE shiny metal - a gold broach, or anything gold would have shone out on your clothing far more than any other metal.
See this video of a Roman era coin being unearthed by a metal detectorist - untarnished or corroded after 2000 years:
We know that gold is valuable today because of its distribution, availability and metallurgical properties. But random tribes who haven’t even seen an iron tool somehow decided that this shiny metal was scarce and valuable enough to hoard and desire.
Is it something in the metal itself?