This 4chan post got purged. It's a military guy with a warning.
(media.scored.co)
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No, they are not. They are inflation hedges and a store of value. If we have nukes going off, food and firearms are the currency de jour.
Either way, silver, gold and crypto go up and down with rest of the market, because people buy them as investments same as anything else.
People traded gold and silver during much more technologically primitive times, i.e what we'll see in a major SHTF situation. It will still be more convenient than barter.
And pms don't go up and down with the rest of the market, they preform better when there is a lot of risk and little return in speculative assets, historically. For example during stagflation of the 1970s.
In primitive times, people mostly bartered. Settled agriculture and city states and civilizations used gold and silver.
I suppose, to be fair to your argument, you'll have to define SHTF situation. Weimar inflation? Okay, then people will use silver/gold. Nukes? Then all bets are off. There is a range in between.
Metals, like all investments, go up or down. They REALLY go up and down now because for both, but mostly gold, people don't own physical gold, they own gold shares of which there isn't enough physical gold to correspond. Did they perform better than stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.? Depends on your starting and ending points.
I can't agree that after nuclear war all bets are off. For a short time if there is famine then perhaps yes. But if the nukes only wiped DC off the map and left the country stateless and confused (at the federal level), people would lose faith in the currency and gold would be money.
Even if multiple cities or states are totally decimated, those that aren't and are in areas that can still feed themselves might trade in pms. Precious metals have international value and can be used to purchase goods from suppliers around the world. If a cargo ship could arrange payment in pms (especially the Chinese ones, they love gold) then they will. If groups are migrating they may want pms to store wealth as well.
Yea, that's a lot of assumptions built in there. By all bets are off, I mean that, nobody can really say. It also depends on how many nukes, too. Are we talking WWIII, or some India-Paki exchange, or a tactical nuke in Ukraine?
Anyway, I'm not downplaying gold/silver. I have a fair amount of the latter and a small amount of the former.