The history of gold shows us that it is more than just another commodity: it's a currency. It is the only currency that evolved in the marketplace over the last 5,000 years. Gold was the main world currency in most of Europe, Asia and the Americas for most of the last few thousand years, up until 1971 and the end of the Bretton Woods Accord and the Gold Standard.

Gold evolved independently as money in the world's main civilizations because it is:

1. Rare - Only about 5 parts per billion of the earths crust is comprised of gold.
2. Difficult and expensive to mine - Thus creating some value for extracting it and hold it.
3. Indestructible - It does not tarnish or decay over time.
4. Compact - If all the gold ever mined were made into a solid block whose base was the size of a football field, then it would be about 1.5 meters (5 feet) high.
5. Malleable and divisible - You can easily mold it into jewelry, coins, bars and divide it into many tiny pieces to be used as a currency.
6. Hard to find - The amount of mined gold has increased only slowly and at the best of times rarely more than 2% per year. This slow increase is hard to manipulate when compare that to inflation.

The only currency not created and controlled by any one particular government is gold and silver. All of today's other currencies (dollars, euros, yen, pounds, renminbis, rupees, etc) are fiat currencies, which means they do not represent anything physical. It can be difficult to measure the worth of countries fiat currency because it is valued based on government decree (namely legal tender laws). Governments can and usually do manipulate the value of their currency sometimes just to give them a competitive edge over other countries when it comes to attracting financial reserves.