Gold

Monetary property checklist

Property	Met
Medium of exchange	✅
Unit of account	✅
Portable	✅
Durable	✅
Divisible	✅
Fungible	✅
Relative scarcity	✅

Gold has all the properties of sound money: A Medium of Exchange (MoE), a Unit of Account (UoA), portable, durable, divisible, fungible, and is relatively scarce. That's why it's been used as money for thousands of years.

Gold is inherently private. From a individual perspective, gold won't be tracked by anyone unless you want it to be. Hide it under your mattress, in a safe, or in a vault. You decide.

Gold is fairly easy to get your hands on. You can buy it from a dealer, online, or at a local shop. Once you have it in hand, it's yours as long as you keep it safe. It's easy to invest in by buying it and holding it. When you're ready to sell, you can do so at a dealer or online.

The most useful thing about gold is that it's price tag won't go to zero any time soon. It's history has shown it be in demand for thousands of years and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. If the world goes to shit, gold will still be valuable.

Gold clears in some of the deepest physical and wholesale markets on earth. For standard bars and common coins, bid-ask is usually manageable and you can move serious size if you know the rails.

Settlement is not click-to-cash like a major transparent crypto on a big exchange: you may wait on assaying, wire timing, or dealer hours. For very large physical moves, logistics and verification still matter, so it is not frictionless liquidity even when demand is strong.

Gold is shelf stable. You leave it in a safe for a thousand years and it will still be there. It's a good bet that gold will still be valuable in the future, pending some catastrophic event or exotic new technology that makes it obsolete. Obviously, we can't make our decisions on unlikely events so we can assume tomorrow, your gold will still be in demand.

Gold is extremely easy to self-custody. You can hide it under your mattress, in a safe, or in a vault. You can also store it at a depository. It's up to you how you want to do it, but it's easy to do.

What's great about gold is that a small amount of gold can be worth a lot of money making it easier to store than other physical assets that require more space- like copper or silver.

The downside to self-custody is that it's not as easy to transport as digital assets in large quantities. You can carry it in your pockets extremely easily, but if you need to move large quantities, then you really need to focus on security and opsec.

That said, things like Goldbacks makes self-custody even easier by making it possible to carry small amounts of gold in a note you can fold and spend.

Widely available from dealers and some local shops. Premiums and spreads still matter for small buyers. There is some trust involved in buying from a dealer or local shop. You need to be sure you're getting the real thing and not a counterfeit but once you find your trusted dealer, you can generally buy with confidence.

You can buy small amounts of gold with Goldbacks and other forms of physical gold in grams and fractional ounces. Once you do a little research, you'll find that gold is very accessible.

Owning gold is the ultimate form of wealth sovereignty. No middlemen, no gatekeepers, no government interference. You own it, you control it, you decide what to do with it. You can spend it, invest it, or hold it for the future.

Fully allocated metal you hold directly is nobody else's liability. Unallocated products, pool accounts, or synthetic claims reintroduce an issuer or custodian; we score direct metal on its best use case.

Physical settlement can be private and final between willing parties without a payments network that can freeze an account. The remaining risks are physical-world: theft, coercion, and border controls, not a database toggle.