I see little to no value in gold, however the person I would sell it to does, which is why I would pick it up and sell it. You want an excellent parody of this? Look no further than Douglas Adams. The survivors of the crash on Earth attach value to leaves, and are trying to find ways of limiting its availability, Ford and Arthur are bewildered by this as the leaves have no perceived value to them. It's excellent parody. I'll ask you, if gold suddenly lost its scarcity, would you still perceive it as being valuable? If I could sell you 100 tons of it at $1 per ton, where does the value lie?

And those properties makes it valuable to my grandmother how? Yes to electrical engineers, no to my grandmother.

Also, don't get confused with the difference between "value" and "money", the two are not directly related (One man may value something greater than the other, and therefore is prepared to part with more money to obtain it). If major investors in gold decided that the value of gold was decreased in some way, fatuously say a meteorite of pure gold flattens France, it would suddenly become a poor store of wealth as its perceived value would have decreased due to less scarcity.

The only perceived value which is consistent is power, more of the variety of manpower or horsepower...

I was trying not to basically open up the can of worms that that is music and piracy. Copying an mp3 is only piracy due to the desire to create a scarcity of the item in question. Which in turn is supposed to drive up its value through that scarcity.

Someone who copies this "scarce" mp3 could take pains to suggest that the value of the mp3 is artificial due to the artificial nature of the scarcity, and that if the scarcity is removed, it therefore intrinsically has little to no value any more.

The default value of anything is the cost of the materials plus the manpower to create that copy, which for a digital item is virtually zero.

It's not even market economy, it's just perceived value, and that's been going on since mankind could only talk in grunts, and cave women traded sex for food.

Why is gold valuable? Its not good for anything, I don't think it's even particularly pleasant to look at, Silver is much prettier. It however retains significant value due to its relative scarcity, and the value people place on scarcity.

((I'm ignoring the digital issue, where anything digitised has effectively infinite quantities, because we seem to buy into allowing artificial scarcity to be created... which I don't get at all))

Virtually everything is worth something to someone, so why is this actually so surprising? Would we be shocked if the story read "Man makes millions selling dung / water / himself"???