I did a quick thread search here and didn't find it. Could you add one of those tasers, a length of rope, and a feather to your bag? That way, you can be hiding behind trees and rocks, and take down a threatening-looking person, tie them up, and then let them wake up or regain the ability to speak before tickling their feet for information about nearby lookouts, access to fuel and food, etc.
:sombrero:
I would hold off on carrying THAT much gold, unless your intent is to buy the whole lot of ammunition at a national guard armory with a well-placed bribe. You could carry silver coins like dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and dollars, which are easily recognizable by the public and remember two things - look for a solid light-color reed edge unlike your 1965-and-up coins you have today, and drop one on a hard surface and listen to the way they ring as opposed to your base-metal coins. However, there is the possibility, if sources of information is correct that with silver, you would run into the same problem - silver could end up being valuated the SAME as gold, if not multiples of gold because of industrial usage that has used up nearly all the available aboveground stock of silver in any form, and the USGS also believes that we have maybe 16 years' mining supply of silver left in the ground (silver tends to be found near the ground surface, and there is less and less available the deeper you go). The way things are going, you would probably be able to buy a house with land for a handful or more of either metal.
You may also run into a fairly unique situation in which the dollar has been destroyed to the point that it's simply better to valuate gold/silver in terms of ounces, rather than dollars in which you must constantly watch the dollar market and adjust signs every day (or hour for that matter like it's happened in some countries). For instance, Hugo Salinas Price of México is advocating the return of silver to Mexican coinage so that it can run alongside paper pesos so that the average citizen can afford to use pesos in everyday transactions and use silver Libertads for storing their earnings, and his idea is this - don't put a currency value on any coin to avoid the "flash point" problem. The "flash point" problem happens everywhere you have currency debasement. What happens is that you have say, a silver dime that had a melt value of less than 10 cents per dime (about $1.26 per troy ounce, and there are roughly 14 dimes per troy ounce) back in the day. What happens when the price of silver goes up to $2, 3, 4 an ounce? Suddenly, you have a dime that you can take to the coin shop to be sold merely for melt value, at a price higher than its face value. That means silver coins like these are either hoarded or otherwise taken out of circulation, and debased coins take its place. It's "bad money" chasing out "good money," Gresham's Law.
Leave the currency value off of anything made and sold by humans on Earth, and simply state things like "This shirt is available for 1 ounce and 1 dime of silver plus 30 nickels," or "This small engine is worth 32 ounces of silver and three silver quarters." That way, you eliminate using a government-controlled currency that is always changing, and you keep precious-metal-based coinage from disappearing out of circulation. You also want to eliminate a government-mandated fixed gold/silver ratio because it can be and has been abused by people who knew how to use the natural market rate against the constitutionally fixed rate in order to pick up extra metal without lifting a finger except go to the market and trade for undervalued metal, and go to your bank where you can trade for the overvalued metal, and then go back and repeat it, all day long.
Sorry that I digressed from the topic by half a state... :088:
