G,

Your reasoning is sound. Ultimately, anything that can be manipulated WILL be manipulated and therefore destroyed as its value erodes to nothing. The only things that will remain will be non-manipulatable items of value such as gold and silver and corn and wheat and oil.

This is why gold has retained its value for all these centuries. Try as hard as mankind can, he just cannot screw up gold. Anything mankind can screw up, he eventually and inevitably will. God must have known this and therefore created gold, so man would always have a starting point to get back to when he had once again made a mess of everything. Bull