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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
More reactive competing metal – silver. The popularity of silver as a currency was largely due to the abundant stocks of the metal that were discovered in South America by the Spaniards, particularly in the mines of Potosi (in present-day Bolivia) which continues to be a region of ecologically questionable mineral extraction.Celebrated chronicler of the Klondike gold rush, Jack London, conceded in his back-of-the-envelope cost benefit analysis that the miners had probably invested over $220 million dollars to build infrastructure and sustain themselves in order to dig up around $22 million of gold. Yet to him, this calculation at the turn of the twentieth century was still weighted in favor of the yellow metal’s worth. He noted still that this monumental effort was still of “inestimable benefit to the Yukon country,” because “natural obstacles will be cleared away or surmounted, primitive methods abandoned, and hardship of toil and travel reduced to the smallest possible minimum.”Gold was almost universally valued, but there were some rare exceptions to the rule. In highly resource scarce communities, such as the desert tribes of the Sahara, the mineral commodity of choice was not an inert metal like gold but a compound formed by one of the most reactive metals in the periodic table – sodium. Peter Bernstein describes the comparison between gold and salt in the eyes of the Saharan tribesmen: “What must those poor diggers have thought of the funny people from the North country who swapped inestimable salt for stuff whose only role was to give men pride and pleasure by letting them see its luster.”Following Newton’s earlier interest in gold, there was a period of uncertainty worldwide until huge reserves of gold were discovered in Southern Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century. The United States instituted the gold standard during
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