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How about cooking oil?
My understanding of precious metals is that they work as currencies first because of their scarcity and second because humans increase their value because they find new uses for their rare properties (eg:silver's conductivity, gold's extreme corrosion resistance) as technology increases.
Cooking oil does not seem to have much scarcity to me, and its value might decrease with technology as innovations like air frying are cutting into the cooking oil market.
Gold is also easily transportable in usable quantities (coins) but would cooking oil be as easily transportable? Would it wind up being traded in paper IOUs instead, requiring a central regulating authority, like the commodities market currently is?
Although hoarding cooking oil would amusingly make me like The Simpsons' Groundskeeper Willie: "Ach! Muh Retirement Grease!"
I like to think of value in terms of viability: crypto at the lowest and non-perishable food or firearms at the top. How valuable would precious metals be in a starving world? I figure that if the economy is in such a way that precious metals would be an alternative, they'd inherently be worthless given the situation.
If precious metals were the currency then would it even be possible for the economy to go so wrong?
I suspect that precious metals will always rise back to the top even in the bad times as bartering doesn't seem like a long-term solution as a barter-based economy is inefficient. I'm reminded that there was a Star Trek DS9 episode about this ("In the Cards"), where the two kids spend an entire episode bartering goods to acquire something that they could've gotten in five minutes if they'd used currency.
If a crisis happens and we use something that is in high demand but not [permanently] scarce, like bullets, as currency then eventually more people will work to make bullets and then bullets will lose their scarcity and inflation will devalue the bullet currency. At that point we'd switch back to gold/silver since, while medieval alchemists and 1950s scifi writers thought that we would be creating more gold and silver by now, AFAIK it hasn't happened yet.
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