A friend in my golf league recently asked me about gold. I told him I'd bring a gold coin to look at and it would explain a lot.
I took a "gangster nickel", a $5 gold piece from the late 1800's, a brit sovereign, a 1 oz Au eagle, a 61 quarter, a walking lib half, and a recent silver eagle to show him after my league match. At the 19th hole, there was about 20 men sitting around a few tables all drinking beer and swapping lies when Don asked about gold again in front of every body.

The short story is that no one could correctly identify all the coins. Everyone identified the silver quarter and half. No one identified the gangster nickel. Two identified the sovereign (one was Australian) while one thought it was a kruggerand. A little over half identified the silver eagle, a little less than half id’d the 1 oz gold eagle,s they commented about seeing them on TV and thought they were supposed to be “bigger”. About 6 folks had a good idea of the current price of gold. Only two could get close to the current price of silver.

The interesting thing I took away was that if the fiat goes to hell in a hand basket, silver coins would be easily identified by most americans, but it would take a while for people to recognize their value. Gold coins will be even less recognized for what and how valuable they are early on. I am coming to the notion that it wold take some kind of crisis for people to have the slightest inclining of the value of real money. It is no wonder that very very people have a clue what caused the latest economic crash. Most think it was just because people couldn’t make their mortgage payments. Absolutely no idea of what a derivative is or the danger of the huge risk associated with leverage. “They” have done a masterful job of keeping people ignorant about all things money.

Don just ordered his "initial purchase" consisting of a bag of junk silver, a gold eagle and gold buffalo. He is just starting to hang out in some pm websites and has sent me 3 emails this morning all excited about what he is learning. And the talking heads are talking about gold mania and a gold bubble! Just wait!