Leave the Gold in the Ground
Yap money stones, consultation fees, Morgan Stanley vendors, crypto-to-GSE contagion and the Epstein files.
Gold is shiny and can be made into jewelry. For this and other reasons it is valuable and has been used as money for millennia. First there were gold coins, and later there was paper money backed by gold. Even now, gold is an important reserve asset, and people hold it in their financial portfolios in the form of gold futures, gold exchange-traded funds, etc.
A lot of gold sits in vaults underground. If you buy gold reserves or futures or ETFs, you get entries in a database entitling you to some of that gold underground.1 There is a whole financial system built on moving gold around in which the gold doesn’t actually move. The gold is heavy. Just the electronic database entries move. The gold sits there. Its shininess is abstract and potential; it is dark in the vaults.