Gold is not accepted at my local supermarket, and probably not yours either. They take cash or card, but not gold. You have to convert it into currency first. You can do this in any country if you know where to go, but you get the point - it's not as handy as paper money. Suppose you have a 1 ounce gold coin (worth USD 1882 today) and you owe your friend $100. You have the money, but how do you pay him? Do you file bits off the coin, or do you ask for change from $1882 ?
"Gold is not accepted at my local supermarket, and probably not yours either."
Neither is any other "foreign currency" which also needs to be "exchanged to local currency first".
See that's the thing the markets are trying to figure out right now ... is gold an industrial commodity? In which case, yes it is terribly overpriced! Or, is it in a time of world-wide currency crises reviving its historical role as a store of value, an AAAA++ rated, supra-sovereign "monetary asset" (rather than granted an immediate for-daily-barter currency) with no debt burden and no counterparty risk? If yes, it might still be vastly undervalued!
The original statement was "A real currency is widely accepted, gold is not". The following question was "Where is gold not accepted?"
My reply of "At the supermarket" is, I think, a succinct and correct response about the basic difference between currency and valuables. My local supermarket won't take US dollars either since I'm not in the USA. You know well enough that supermarkets in the USA do take dollars, and no supermarket anywhere takes gold (if you find one, let me know what it gives as change). The point still stands. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate more information on why along with the down-votes.
This downvote == disagreeing is so annoying, this prevents discussions.
It is one thing when someone gives an upvote for agreeing but downvotes are for insulting and off topic posts.
But it's completely irrelevant to this discussion. Context matters. And the fact that there are or not supermarkets that accept a certain currency is irrelevant to its usefulness as a reserve.
It'd actually be an interesting experiment to see what you could buy with smaller-denomination gold coins. I would bet some number of independent businessmen (but not large chain stores) would be willing to accept, say, the 1/10-oz American Gold Eagle as equivalent to around $180.
If that caught on, the next logical step would be for more counterfeit gold coins to come into circulation. Do these businessmen have the energy to try to detect fraud in two kinds of currency? Especially as gold coin fraud doesn't have the same harsh legal penalties as counterfeiting paper money.
