Can I Accept Gold?
"You can accept almost anything mutually agreeable to you and the other party as payment. That's the definition of ""barter"". If you agree to trade manufactured goods for livestock, as long as both parties agree on the terms, I'm not aware of any law that would prohibit it. I hedged with ""almost"" because of course you can't accept something that is explicitly illegal. Like you can't say you'll accept cocaine as payment. Less obviously, there are laws regulating the sale of guns, nuclear fuel, agricultural products, etc. You'd still have to pay taxes, and it can get complicated to determine the taxable value of the transaction. Sorry, but you can't avoid taxes by getting your income in something other than cash." Of course you can accept gold as payment.  Would anyone pay in gold? Would it have tax consequences on your federal taxes? These additional questions are off-topic on this site about personal finance. "Yes. ""There is, ...no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services."" Taken from the US Department of the Treasury." Yes.  But the question is do you want to have gold?  If you are going to buy gold anyway, and if you can get a good conversion rate between USD:gold, then why not? If you are looking to use your earnings on things that you cannot buy using gold, then I'd recommend you take USD instead. Have fun!
"I'd agree with maybe a concept of ""situational value"" being negative while accepting ""intrinsic value"" means ""what use a person can expect to get out of it"", but again, both ultimately are subjective. That said, there can be benefits from drawing a distinction between the two.  Going back to Bitcoin, it does have an ""intrinsic value"", because the value of Bitcoin itself is that it can be divided up easily, transferred easily, and etc, all the things that make a currency valuable. Traditionally, we value things as money if they meet many of the following criteria:  1. Medium of exchange 2. Unit of account 3. Store of value 4. Standard of deferred payment 5. Measure of Value  Gold meets some of these better than others, dollars meet some of these better than others, and so on, but Bitcoin meets all of these very well, which means (at least to me) that Bitcoin has intrinsic value in that it meets the definition of what we value the most in a *currency*.  So maybe as long as we agree that there is a difference between subjective value and intrinsic value, and agree that subjective value can, in fact, be negative, there may be something to go on here." "First of all, setting some basics: What is a sound way to measure the risk of each investment in order to compare them with each other ? There is no single way that can be used across all asset classes / risks. Generally speaking, you want to perform both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of risks that you identify.  Quantitative risk assessment may involve historical data and/or parametric or non-parametric models. Using historical data is often simple but may be hard in cases where the amount of data you have on a given event is low (e.g. risk of bust by investing in a cryptocurrency). Parametric and non-parametric risk quantification models exist (e.g. Value at Risk (VaR), Expected Shortfall (ES), etc) and abound but a lot of them are more complicated than necessary for an individual's requirements. Qualitative risk assessment is ""simply"" assessing the likelihood and severity of risks by using intuition, expert judgment (where that applies), etc. One may consult with outside parties (e.g. lawyers, accountants, bankers, etc) where their advisory may help highlighting some risks or understanding them better. To ease comparing investment opportunities, you may want to perform a risk assessment on categories of risks (e.g. investing in the stock market vs bond market). To compare between those categories, one should look at the whole picture (quantitative and qualitative) with their risk appetite in mind. Of course, after taking those macro decisions, you would need to further assess risks on more micro decisions (e.g. Microsoft or Google ?). You would then most likely end up with better comparatives as you would be comparing items similar in nature. Should I always consider the worst case scenario ? Because when I do that, I always can lose everything. Generally speaking, you want to consider everything so that you can perform a risk assessment and decide on your risk mitigating strategy (see Q4). By assessing the likelihood and severity of risks you may find that even in cases where you are comparatively as worse-off (e.g. in case of complete bust), the likelihood may differ. For example, keeping gold in a personal stash at home vs your employer going bankrupt if you are working for a large firm. Do note that you want to compare risks (both likelihood and severity) after any risk mitigation strategy you may want to put in place (e.g. maybe putting your gold in a safety box in a secure bank would make the likelihood of losing your gold essentially null). Is there a way to estimate the probability of such events, better than intuition ? Estimating probability or likelihood is largely dependent on data on hand and your capacity to model events. For most practical purposes of an individual, modelling would be way off in terms of reward-benefits. You may therefore want to simply research on past events and assign them a 1-5 (1 being very low, 5 being very high) risk rating based on your assessment of the likelihood. For example, you may assign a 1 on your employer going bankrupt and a 2 or 3 on being burglarized. This is only slightly better than intuition but has the merit of being based on data (e.g. frequency of burglary in your neighborhood). Should I only consider more probable outcomes and have a plan for them if they occur? This depends largely on your risk appetite. The more risk averse you are, the more thorough you will want to be in identifying, tracking and mitigating risks. For the risks that you have identified as relevant, or of concern, you may opt to establish a risk mitigating strategy, which is conventionally one of accepting, sharing (by taking insurance, for example), avoiding and reducing. It may not be possible to share or reduce some risks, especially for individuals, and so often the response will be either to accept or avoid the given risks by opting in or out on an opportunity." Gold since the ancient time ( at least when it was founded) has kept its value. for example the french franc currency was considered valuable in the years 1400~ but in 1641 lost its value. However who owned Gold back then still got value.  The advantage of having gold is you can convert it to cash easily in the world. it hedges against inflation: it is value rise when inflation happend. Gold has no income,no earnings. its not like a stock or a bond. its an alternative way to store value the Disadvantages of investing in Gold  Gold doesnt return income , needs physical storage and insurance, Capital gains tax rates are higher on most gold investments. the best way to invest gold when there is inflation is expected. source "It has semantic value (because we culturally believe gold is valuable).  There is a very important point here.  Gold and many other coin metals. This ""semantic value"" is enshrined in law through the special tax status of coin metals.  You can buy a kilo of gold and not pay sales tax.  You can't buy a kilo of iron or tin and do the same.  This is the important part because investors shouldn't care about semantics. I read that the taxable status varies by state or nation, so you need to be very careful.  It's possible to evade taxes without realizing it.  It also doesn't necessarily exempt you from the form of gold.  An ingot should be tax exempt.  A collector's coin may or may not be, depending on your local laws and the difference between the value of the weight of the gold, and the value of the form of the coin." Gold and Silver have gone up massively as the dollar has devalued.   Roosevelt actually did confiscate gold, you were required to sell it to the federal Reserve.   I would stay away from nusimatics or other overpriced vehicles for gold but the underlying statements are true. I thought the same. Money as a transferable item is against future items, and debt is a transferable item against future money, which is also seen as a much farther into the future item.  Money = tomorrows item. Debt = tomorrows money = (tomorrows item)(time +1); or longer if we agree to pay it off over 20 years  Interestingly I have seen a writeup on why gold is the material of choice.   If someone can find this it would be great but I will try write from memory, Google is not helping. The story is something like this:  Essentially when trading a material for jewellery we had difficulty finding what material to use. Obviously it must be something hardy and tough, but not common. Metals are the obvious choice, although crystalline structures like gems and opals are useful. The reason for metals are that they can easily and repeatably be shaped into a form that will be aesthetically pleasing and hold its shape.   But which specific metal is to be chosen; obviously it must be chemically stable, so potassium magnesium and those metal like elements are removed from contention. It must be rare so items like lead, iron and copper are too common, although not worthless.  The most stable, malleable and rare materials are Platinum, Silver and Gold.   Platinum requires too high a melting point to be suitable; the requirements to smelt and handle it as a material are too high. Not to deny the value but the common use it prohibitive.   Silver is easier to handle, but tends to tarnish. Continuous upkeep is required and this becomes a detraction of its full value.  Finally Gold, rare, low melting point, resistant to tarnishing and oxidation, rare, malleable and pretty. A sweet spot of all materials. You can buy real gold, or you can buy shares of a gold ETF, or invest in gold futures contracts. There's a number of ways, but the goal is to be exposed to the price fluctuations of gold.  I actually have a bank account through www.goldmoney.com. It works just like PayPal or a bank account. You send money and buy gold and then they send you a debit card linked to that account. When you swipe it, you're spending your gold. They also cater to business customers as well..you can send invoices to get paid, do payroll, and everything in between. gold is incredibly volatile, I tried spreadbetting on it.  During the month of its highest gain, month beginning to month end, I was betting it would go up - and I still managed to lose money. It went down so much, that my stop loss margin would kick in.   Don't do things with gold in the short term its a very small and liquid market. My advice with gold, actually buy some physical gold as insurance.