Subj : Re: Silver and Gold
To   : The Godfather
From : k9zw
Date : Wed Apr 19 2023 19:14:39

On 15 Apr 2023, The Godfather said the following...

 TG> To your point, the argument I hear regarding any precious metal being
 TG> able to validate it's legitimacy while also it's percentages.  The
 TG> debate seems to be one group suggesting "lead and cans of food, alcohol,
 TG> tobacco, coffee" for bater while others insist on Gold or Silver. I'd
 TG> think a bit of "all of the above."  Your thoughts?

To address you second set of questions.

Precious Metal vailidation - this is somewhat hard to do actually if the fraudsters are clever and technically able.  

That said you can do some basics, chemicals, magnetic slides, volume/mass analysis come to mind, but remember the pros (including mints/depositories) get hoodwinked now and then.  Coinage from Nations that are well recognized have less of a risk than private mintages from places you do not know.  

Commodity Metals - the bulk needed to have significant value has to be considered, as it is harder to deal with, but also hard for someone to steal.

The "Other Lead" (aka ammo) - expected there will be an ongoing demand, predicated on collapse happening before any large scale effective confiscation happens.  If people are unarmed, the ammo is not very useful.

There is a lot of suggestion that ammo could be the small-change, which if the ammo wasn't itself fragile, potentially have some danger, and quickly becomes low value if let get wet, corrode, get dented, or heavily pocket-worn, I am thinking any such use will be rather limited.

Alcohol - always an ongoing demand for hooch from beer to wine to spirits.  If you know what you are doing you can produce more.  Could be useful.

Tobacco - has a shelf life (Korean War C-Rations opened in the 1980s had cigarettes in them that were like dried leaves) but the users are very eager to have their cigarettes.  Often traded amoung prisoners in ongoing micro-economies. In many areas you can grown the plants, but the curing is complicated to do, so it may be hard to produce signicant volumes as home grown.  Or it might be easy, as I have never seen it grown.

Coffee - Much like tobacco, except you are not going to get more except by imports.  Frozen or canned beans are said to be longer term storage.  

Some categories beyond your list:

Street Drugs - some writers predict these will be very valuable as people want/need them and usually there are few natural subsitutes.  The desire is high enough that security will be an issue.  There is also serious moral issues about providing poisons to people. 

Medical Drugs - will be very high value, exepting that you have to connect with someone who needs the medicines which is a subset of people, and that many medications had shelf lifes.  Some universal basics would be easily bartered though.

Hope this gets you thinking!

--- Steve K9ZW via SPOT BBS 

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