There have been many times but these times are different. I personally
believe that skills and tools are much more valuable than any hard
currency.
On another list we just completed a very long and involved treatment of gold
as money and the safety and wisdom of investing "value" in it. The history
of gold as money is fascinating!
Those who are not Douglas Adams fans please indulge me, but one scene in the
'Hitchhikers' series is where the protagonists are on a derelict planet
where they find a space ship thousands of years old still hooked up to its
power source. When they make their way in and inquire of the robot flight
crew, they find that the passengers have been put into suspended animation
(for their comfort and convenience) thousands of years ago and are awakened
every 100 years or so for biscuits and tea then put back into suspension.
The crew is waiting for clearance to take off, which they cannot do until
the ship's stores are complete ... lacking only their complement of lemon
scented napkins. When the protagonists remind the robots that their
civilization is dead and has been for millions of years, they reply that
while that is true, the odds are other civilizations will arise and will
invent lemon scented napkins and then the ship's stores will be complete and
it can take off.
The phenomenon that gold always is a reliable receptacle of value is akin to
that. It surprises many that gold shares one important characteristic with
paper money or fiat money, it only has a value if a government says that it
does. Wait a minute! says you. What about when a government was
collapsing utterly or when we find gold from a sunken ship that went down
500 years ago? The gold's still valuable! Here's the thing, like the lemon
scented napkins, the gold has value because the odds are there will be other
governments sometime, somewhere who will enforce gold as a currency and so
the odds are in your favor that if you hang onto it, it will still serve as
an exchange commodity. The difference with paper money is that once the
monetary system collapses, the odds are that it will NOT serve as currency
of another government or monetary system.
Tools and commodities (and to a large extent, skills) are not subject to
someone else valuing them, and this sets them apart from either purely fiat
money or gold.