Online merchants are aggressively hawking gold beans. On Alibaba’s Taobao, one of China’s biggest e-commerce platforms, a merchant sold gold beans on a livestream — a blend of the Home Shopping Network and Amazon. She said buying beans was “like shopping, but an investment.”
The tiny beans came in five shapes, including one that resembled a peanut and another like a persimmon. Paying $87 per bean, a person could buy into the gold boom for the price of a hot pot meal, she said.
Has anyone ever bought these in Taiwan? Is the idea that you hold on to them for some time and then go back to the jeweler or goldsmith and then sell them that way? Or give them away as part of a dowry?
Gold went through a 20+ year dip before returning to it’s current levels. But the idea of buying magic bea… I mean, gold beans on Taobao sounds interesting but highly suspect to me.
Gold prices from the article
28-year “dip” but it has since been dwarfed by prices the past 10 years
Gold beans from the article
Gold beans and other root plants as visualized by GPT
I have a little bit of gold put by, but I wouldn’t buy anything in non-standard shapes for investment purposes. I’m sure whoever is selling these things is doing quite nicely, but I doubt you’d be able to sell them for anything like the same price you bought them for.
The price of gold is just insane right now. Not sure whether it’s really China pushing the price upwards or whether there’s a broader base of buyers who can see the writing on the wall.
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I agree. Coins – I can understand better. Beans? I thought this was a joke at first
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Well, you could buy those gold beans, but you’d have no way of verifying the purity of those metal, or if it’s even gold at all. It means if you’re going to sell it it’s going to sell for scrap gold price assuming their XRF verified that it is indeed gold.
Also the buy/sell price difference of precious metal is enough that you’re always going to lose money unless the price of gold continues to rise to infinity.
Only reason you’re buying gold is either you want some kind of valuable around for breakdown of society, or you are going to use the metal for whatever reason (industry, or you are a jeweler). If society breaks down in such a way that traditional fiat currency becomes worthless, you got bigger problems than not having gold around to trade with. Then you got issues with security. If you’re going to hold onto those gold yourself, what happens if thieves break in and take them? If you’re buying gold accounts where you don’t hold the gold physically, then it becomes useless if fiat currency breaks down.
Another issue is those gold beans could be tungsten covered in gold, you have no way of knowing without a XRF.
