Yes, I agree... having to put coins on a scale at walmart or any other establishment would be a rather cumbersome process indeed!
Just like it would be to have to "validate" a Karatbar.
For the record, we're not talking about gold flakes, ...but rather an actual gold bullion piece, ...an ingot embedded and sealed in a plastic card in order to protect it. It is not a $20 plastigold card, ...but rather a genuine gram of 24KT 999.9 pure LBMA certified currency grade gold worth about $80 today.
1 gram of gold would be apprxomiately 0.625 tall by 0.3" wide by 0.015" thick. For reference, you'd need more than 28 of these "ingots" to have 1 ounce of gold. So it's a very small "ignot" hence my sarcastic comment about gold flakes; ironically enough you seem to think that gold flakes are somehow less valuable than "ingots" which I guess goes to show just how much you know about the subject. Let me educate you:
The flakes could be of just as high a purity as any ingot. In fact, gold of very high purity is extremely soft and malleable and can easily flake. This is why it's typically alloyed with other metals - for structural strength - and the reason that "good delivery" bars of gold are rated 995 is exactly that: to ensure that the bar has structural strength.
The fineness of an ingot or a piece of jewerly, which you seem to think categorizes gold into "good" and "bad" doesn't actually do that; it only tells you the per-mille content of the piece in gold vs. the other metals in the alloy, and allows you to determine how much pure gold you're actually getting per troy ounce.
The reason why I refer to it as a "plastigold" card is because the cost required to extract the gold "ingot" would likely be high enough to not make it worth while for someone to remove the gold unless it's done in a massive scale. That's where Karatbars gets its relative "security" from and why it might be reasonable to trust such a card, if you know that it exists to begin with. The fancy holograms and other bullshit on the plastic are... well... bullshit.
As the value of US$ continues to be worth less and less with each passing month as the Fed prints up and injects $40 Billion into the economy, the value of karatbars goes up and up.
And so does the value of palladium. And copper. And pork bellies. Why aren't you buying bacon?
Having a 1 gram karatbar is like having a $80 bill.
Sure, and if all you want to do is stack $80 "bills" under the mattress, Karatbars could work, but would take up a lot more volume the more "traditional" bars or rounds.
But you are peddling this as a currency, and as a currency it's worthless because it's not easily divisible (I can't pay my $40 bill by cutting a Karatbar in half). Assuming I could find an establishment that accepts Karatbars, the only way I could get change back would be in fiat currency, like U.S. greenbacks and coins - the stuff you
hate so much.
If you think getting change for a $0.75 pack of gum is difficult, ...try getting change for that pack of gum when paying with a 1 oz gold coin, ...IF they will even accept it.
Why would I want to do somehting stupid like that? For one thing, the face value of 1 ounce gold coins is significantly less than the value of the gold content, and an establishment accepting the coin as currency would only accept it for its face value; not for the value of its gold content. For another, I'm perfectly content paying for it with my debit card or with the change floating around my car. And you know what? I bet that for all your talk, you are too.
I'd rather execute a transactions armed with 31 $80 bills, than with 1 $1800 bill
I'd rather execute such a transaction with 2 $1,000 bills, or since those are no longer available, 20 $100 bills. But hey... what do I know?
But don't worry, ...when hyperinflation kicks in, and your money becomes worthless, that pack of gum may indeed cost you $7.50 ...and that karatbar worth $80 today, might indeed be worth $800 tomorrow.
Even if we do get rising inflation the risk of hyperinflation is smaller than the gold fla... excuse me, the gold "ingots" in Karatbars.
As for how one makes change.... very simply, ...that's the beauty and ingenuity behind Karatbars and their forward thinking ways. You just watch and see how it gets done!
Oh great, a youtube video recorded by some guy sitting in his basement, reading a manuscript into a $1.99 microphone while paging through a presentation made using the copy of Microsoft Works that shipped with his 75MHz Packard Bell machine.
The guy's
sheer idiocy is evident throughout the video. Here's a representative - pardon the pun - golden nugget from him: "you bought your house with paper money and it's going to be affected." Affected how? Homes, much like gold, are physical commodities, whose values fluctuate indepedent of currency, much like gold. They are only
denominated in dollars (or whatever the local currency may be).
IT WILL BE BRILLIANT!!!
With "senior executives" of that caliber who have such a nuanced understanding of ecomonics? For sure.