The yellow juicy metal that everyone craves for, the metal of kings and pharaohs, the metal that is being used for 5,000 years of recorded human history, and possibly more, the most historically proven form of stable commodity money: GOLD.

Gold has pretty much proven itself to be the most stable form of longterm commodity money over the course of human history, and it has a good track record, nontheless I have some doubts about it, and possibly some criticisms that I would like to share with you.

Now don't get me wrong, I like gold, I do own gold, not much though, a few coins and some jewelry only, but I would not buy more, since I am a bit skeptical about it. My doubts are the following:

• Counterfeit Risk
• Government Seizure
• Market manipulation with paper Gold
• By design it relies on 3rd Party (Can't trade online, Can't store it online, Can't store it safely without expensive vaults,etc... it is a physical item, whereas money should not be physical in my opinion)
• Prone to Scams
• Risk of Hyperinflation (Gold asteroids, Gold synthetization in particle accelerators)

Let's take them one by 1 and analyze them:

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Counterfeit Risk

It requires expensive equipment to detect the composition of your gold, and to prove that indeed it has the purity that you are being told it has. Since many mints work hand in hand with the government or the banks, I would not be surprised if they would pull a scam on us, since they have a pretty solid track record of scamming people. It is hard to detect the genuinity of your gold, versus in cryptocurrency you just need to check your address balance.

Government Seizure

I am worried that the likes of Executive Order 6102 could come back, and come back harder than ever. If the financial system is in collapse, government would do anything to stop gold users, so they will go out of their way to ban gold.

And you would say that: "oh the government will surely can't crack down on every gold user", but that is nonsense, if they really want to crack down on gold, they will implement the following:

• Fine every gold owner for 200,000$
• Imprison every gold owner for 20 years
• Reward snitches 1000$ for every gold owner they rat out
• With surveillance tools they will identify and crack down on every gold vendor
• Police can search your home without warrant if you are suspected of holding gold
  ... etc and other Orwellian methods

So if they really want to crack down on gold, they will. So don't tell me that it is impossible to find gold owners.
And we can see the likes of it:

http://www.shtfplan.com/precious-metals/report-tsa-interrogates-travelers-carrying-gold-and-silver_10242011
http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2016/08/14/greeks-will-have-to-declare-to-tax-office-even-cash-below-100-euro/
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/02/greeks-tax-mattress-gold-jewelry-greece.html

These are real events, if the Government really wants to crack down on something, they will. Your gold is not safe, especially if you hold it in a 3rd party vault, all they need is an executive order, and all is gone. They can do it on a weekend and you will have no way of withdrawing your gold, could will be stolen that easily.

It relies of 3rd Party by design

Gold is physical, you can't access it on an online interface without some physical entity guaranteeing it, but then you go into the risk of "paper gold", which will then turn into a ponzi scheme. It is either digital by design (like BTC or STEEM) or it will always need a 3rd party. Just like you need a government land bureau to register your land in, you will need a bank or clearing house to register your gold in, and then they will try to scam you.

I would love if a decentralized solution would exist to trade gold online without having to trust the clearing house, but even then the risk of confiscation will not go away.

Prone to Scams

There are many gold scams, where dealers fail to deliver or give you tungsten bars, buying gold is risky because it's hard to verify. Not just the counterfeit risk, but even a simple mail order. You will always need insurance and "investigators" to recover your lost or stolen gold. Not a very frictionless economy, if you were to build it on gold.
This is why paper money was invented to eliminate these risks, but then it got abused, so now we evolve into Bitcoin and Steem.

Risk of Hyperinflation

A little bit futuristic but not so much. We are now talking about going to Mars by 2030. So it would not be hard to master the technology of mining on asteroids. There are a lot of asteroids near Mars filled with gold, if only 1 gets to us, it would be tragical as it would literally make your gold holdings worthless, by diluting the gold supply so much. I would think that in about 50 years we could see such technology, and if you are now 20, then by your 70's your gold wealth would evaporate.

Gold synthetization is even more futuristic, but by considering the research at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists could come up any minute with a technology that would allow us to synthetize gold out of mercury or other nearby metals. Alchemy would become reality, and I bet this tech isn't to far ahead either.

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So in conclusion, I think gold has it's merits, so it should not be dismissed at all. I am not anti-gold, I do like gold, I do own gold, but I also have a few fair doubts that I have layed out in this article.

So in my opinion diversification of assets is the most important, and while at gold, I think political diversification is the best. Don't hold your gold in 1 country or in 1 vault, spread it out in the world, so if one country goes 1984 on your gold, you don't lose all of it.

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