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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (140)	10/1/2002 8:24:17 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 445

Maurice, Don, all the gold in the world x $400 an ounce [or $1000 an ounce] and it's still not much compared with the value of all the silver, platinum, aluminium, steel, oil, coal, houses, cars, buildings, milling machines, aircraft, computers, cows, sheep, sheeple and people. Okay, not all those things are suitable as a means of exchange, but they do okay as stores of value, especially when in a reasonably liquid form such as share certificates [or pixels in a computer]. I don't see why they couldn't form a pixelated means of exchange now that cyberspace makes such things easy. Isn't gold doomed to a bit part and an interesting spot in the history books, a bit like horseshoes? There simply isn't enough of it to do anything other than have a place in speculative frenzies of irrational exuberance and infectious greed, which have got a lot of bad press lately. That's my uneducated impression. Maybe I'm wrong. Am I? All values are subjective, and there are only two general ways to store value. Either you store something which will have a use to you in the future, like canned food or ammunition or shelter or a canoe, or something that you expect to be able to exchange for something else that will have a use to you in the future. Canned food, assuming that it doesn't spoil and that you don't lose your can opener, will be pretty stable in use value as daily calorie requirements are unlikely to change much. The problem is that anything you store for your own use is limited by the finite degree of your use of it, so it can't solve the problem of wealth or value storage all by itself. When you store wealth or value for future exchange, there just can't be any guarantees. We know that fiat money will always go to zero, but the future exchange value of gold could be zero as well if no one wants it. The real question is always one of return on and of investment. All exchange valued investments depend on the current supply/demand balance vs the future supply/demand balance. If every one of the 6-8(?) billion people on the planet bought 100 shares each of QCOM over the next week, the last one to buy is not likely to have a good investing experience. There are no inherently good exchange investments, only good times to buy and good times to sell. Everything popular will be overbid up on the demand side. The only virtue of gold is that it is relatively difficult and expensive to increase the supply. Regards, Don