Silver works fine for smaller exchanges. When I was a kid the quarters were made from real silver and you could buy a gallon of gas with one. Now one of those quarters is worth about $3.50, so could you exchange it for a gallon of gas and get some change back.
ML/NJ
Yeah, I like Silver. I bought a lot when it was between $4 and $8 (a very long time) and didn’t sell any till it busted $25 and $30, sold my last 100 ounce bar right at $48, true story. A lot of people got burned on Silver. I was determined not to let that happen. I have a few hundred oz’s left that are basically house money. Once in a while I’ll drag a few of them out of the safe to hear the clink. I had bought a “face bag” of quarters, these are cool. Heavy as hell. The old school money had a distinctive “kashink” that slug money does not have. There were about a dozen slug quarters mixed in with them. When I sold it years later, I took it right back to the same guy that sold it to me. So he runs it through his machine to count them, and bitches about the slugs. “I don’t take those” he says. “Neither do I” says me.
The thing about Silver, in a true emergency, wealthy people don’t want it if they have to unass their country or whatever. Way too heavy. Gold has an amazing compactness to it.