@redpillschool You lose a whole bunch when a house is sold if we're talking flipping to flipping. As far as moving gold and silver, it's only this way right now because the coin dealers are the only local place to exchange it. You have to look at that loss as the cost of doing business in a criminally discounted price-suppressed commodity. You have to look at the the metals in terms of the era where they are valuable outside of the exchanges. In particular, silver will be easier to spend. Silver will be at it's peak value and usefulness when the online exchange rates are as illegitimate as what the Venezuelan government is saying about the fiat bolivar right now. (For background, there is an illegal black market rate and then the official legal rate at the official exchanges). You won't be losing 10% then since you'll be buying products with these coins and not converting them. It will be money.

You don't buy silver to flip it four times a week. It's peak value and usefulness is in a particular stage of the collapse after the apocalypse stage, depending on how it all goes and your region.

@Antelope I'm continually side-stepping this stuff because at every phase I seem to have more relevant things to do, at least by my estimations at the time. I'm taking a frontier approach to property acquisition in Transnistria. It's supposedly not valuable because there aren't hoards of people fighting for it right this minute. To understand my valuation of it look at the entirety of America as a whole. The entire continent was taken by people who would go into some unused frontier (as far as their civilization was concerned) to claim a piece of land that nobody else had yet in order to develop it. Being able to use the land for their own uses was most of the value there. The cost was the time and energy to tame it. Somehow that frontier spirit was lost by being tamed by bubble fiat printing and factory production. One day properties no longer contributed to ones survival, but merely existed as a sort of premium mortgage (no mortgage, just high property taxes) where one could track real inflation and bubble economy. High property taxes ensure that the people will always need to grind in the economy earning in the form of whatever makes the tax man go away.

I'm going against the grain not only according to my Californian culture, but to the Transnistrian culture as well.

For example, my first property was a utility garage that nobody under fifty years old sees any use for. The buildings are built tough as hell in that old way where they use too much material either out of pride or since they didn't have a clear understanding of the minimum fail safes. The cost-value of the structure is just amazing. Then I repurposed this structure in a way that was not though to be compatible or possible with the environment.

My third property was an already finished 14m^2 (150 square feet) dormitory room without it's own bathroom. The cost-value is also amazing. The locals don't like it because just like with the garage they only associate it with poverty since living permanently in such a room is not great. However as a drinking crash pad, office, short-term guest apartment, tourism property, bureaucracy registration vehicle then it is great. The water pipes are on the other side of the wall, so next year I'll bring them over to create a very compact shower and toilet combo wet room. The locals have mostly never seen such a room before, although it's fairly common elsewhere.

This territory is technically legally a war zone but it's perhaps the most de facto peaceful place that I've ever been to. This is a war zone, but look at what your peace zones look like today.

Investment, saving and speculation is fine, but at some point people are going to want to have things that sustain them and don't need to be continually fought over. What is the point in having property if you'll never have any peace from it? What is the point of having a wife if you'll never have any peace from it? So people will be somehow smartly led into various abstractions to paper over the fact that they don't have any peace in their life. They'll be living in various levels of poverty and luxury renters lifestyle. At any moment they'll fall off, no matter where they reside.

The question is if people will recognize the prospect of converting to actual value and peace when all of their hustles have succeeded? I'm going with a big No. Most will hustle into more hustle, endlessly. The skill of converting hustle to contentment and happiness is something that needs to be practiced. Without it is just rolling profits into more profits until you die. This is actually a pretty big problem.

@Antelope That's a good point. For most of us who were middle class, our parents were able to support a family of 4 in the suburbs on just Dad's salary, while Dad also took the family on a vacation every summer and put money away into savings and investment accounts. Most middle class Dads and Moms from that strata live on a combination of investment income, social security, 401k money, and pensions from wherever Dad worked over the years.

Today, in an upper middle class suburb, Dad and Mom both have to work just to pay the mortgage, utilities, and groceries, while forking out extra money for the kids to stay in after school care until 6. School teaches them how to put condoms on cucumbers, white people are evil, the environment is God, that it's okay to be trans if you don't fit in, and that your parents are conservative outdated old farts who don't know anything.

Mom and Dad are never going to be wealthy and are going to work until they're in their 70s. Their kids are going to hate them. And their kids won't even dream of wealth earned through hard work, because that's not a path any more. They'll dream of finding some cush job where they can make minimum wage hiding in a broom closet on their cell phones doing as little work as possible while still banking enough to pay rent for a dirty apartment. All while voting for far left lunatic politicians because free shit for poor people and socialist-style government just means more stuff and less work for them.

If anything, the kids today acting out by doing everything the system says you're not supposed to do should be pretty expected. At least dogecoin is honest. Everybody knows it's a lottery ticket, rug-pull, pump-and-dump scheme going in. Unlike all of the other alleged paths to wealth that try to hide the fact that behind the scenes, the elites are just waiting for the right moment to screw you and make sure you're never wealthy.