It is rare enough to make it difficult to overproduce and malleable to mint into coins, bars, and bricks. Gold does not dissipate into the atmosphere, it does not burst into flames, and it does not poison or irradiate the holder. It melts at a lower temperature and is malleable, making it easy to work with. Platinum’s extremely high melting point would require a furnace of the Gods to melt back in ancient times, making it impractical. Platinum and gold are the remaining elements. Rhodium and palladium are more recent discoveries, with limited historical uses. People have used silver as money, but it tarnishes over time. Once the above elements are eliminated, there are only five precious metals left: platinum, palladium, rhodium, silver and gold. Meanwhile, synthetic elements such as rutherfordium and nihonium must be created in a laboratory. Osmium only exists in the Earth’s crust from meteorites. Nickel and copper, for example, are found throughout the Earth’s crust in relative abundance. For an element to be used as money it needs to be rare, but not too rare. There are about 30 elements that are solid, nonflammable, and nontoxic. Transition, Post Transition Metals, and Metalloids.If you were to carry these around in your pocket they could irradiate or poison you.Īlkali and alkaline earth metals are located on the left-hand side of the periodic table, and are highly reactive at standard pressure and room temperature. Next, lanthanides and actinides are both generally elements that can decay and become radioactive. As a form of money, these are implausible and impractical. Meanwhile, mercury and bromine are liquids. Noble gases (such as argon and helium), as well as elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine and chlorine are gaseous at room temperature and standard pressure. Just as in today’s animation, let’s apply the process of elimination to the periodic table to see why gold is money: The periodic table organizes 118 elements in rows by increasing atomic number (periods) and columns (groups) with similar electron configurations. Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer from Columbia University, broke down the periodic table to show why gold has been used as a monetary metal for thousands of years. However, gold also possesses elemental properties that has made it an ideal metal for money throughout history. In an era filled with cashless transactions and hundreds of cryptocurrencies, this statement seems truer today than in Keynes’ time. The economist John Maynard Keynes famously called gold a “barbarous relic”, suggesting that its usefulness as money is an artifact of the past.
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