Since the dawn of civilization, gold has been considered a highly valuable commodity, first used in religious artifacts in Ancient Egypt and other early civilizations, and later as a currency. The reason for this use is that in pre-modern times, the rarity of gold and the costs of its extraction made it inherently valuable and an easy-to-pick common measuring metric to replace inefficient barter. As only a trickle of gold could be created via mining, this also created a relatively stable supply of money, with inflation only occurring when kings and emperors debased the currency with lesser metals. The fact that the ... (full story)