Thanks for the free psychoanalysis C2 [a very common American habit]. <
You lack historical perspective, a sense of time. > It might surprise you to learn that I was aware of gold being a medium of exchange thousands of years ago, when I was very young [a child not long able to read].
It might also surprise you to know that I was aware of Qualcomm not existing thousands of years ago ever since 1991 and also that it's unlikely to exist sometime in the next 50 to 75 years.
I think this is where you are going wrong: < It was a medium of exchange, not so whatever the equivalent of QCOM may have been back then which, in any event, ceased to exist eons ago > Something way back then equivalent to QCOM would have earned its owner money, which they could use to buy something else, which would also earn them money, which they could use to buy something else which would also earn them money, which they could use to buy ... add 1000 years and we had the British Empire with a huge amount of capital accumulated with which they could buy something else around the world which would also earn them money, which they used to buy other things which also earned them money. Which they then piddled down the drain with socialist revolution seeping into every nook and cranny. Gold can be similarly piddled by foolish descendants.
All that time, gold just sat there doing nothing other than being a medium of exchange among people doing actually useful things. That was a useful function, like making cart wheels. But old technology gets superseded. Cart wheels, gold and Aztecs have had their day. Digging gold now adds no value, it just dilutes the existing value of existing gold. If somebody discovers a trillion ton mountain of pure gold and donates it uniformly to each person on Earth, it won't create any value at all.
Gold is just a shiny rock of which there is a very limited amount. Whether it sits in a mountain, undiscovered, or sits in a bank vault, it is achieving about the same utility except that it's expensive to store because people want to steal it.
I have long ago moved more money out of Qualcomm than I put in and that money has been invested in things which have returned more money than I put into Qualcomm [though some of it was badly invested and was lost, more or less]. You seem to mistakenly be suggesting that because Qualcomm won't last as long as gold has lasted, it's therefore a worse investment. Investments provide returns over and above the original cost of them. Gold is not so much an investment as a simple gambling speculation on the greater fool theory and that it will replace monetary mania by politicians and their citizen serfs.
Gold's value has not really remained stable. People who bought gold in 1980 and held it until their will was read in Y2K would have been thinking that their retirement investment was not all that great. People who bought shares and houses through the 1980s and Qualcomm in the 1990s were very glad to have not bought gold in 1980.
I think I have good enough historical perspective. I'll see your eon and raise you an era.
Mqurice
PS: Just for historical perspective, eons are half a billion years long, but I accept you were just using "eons" as a turn of phrase. |
