Damn, I thought we were making progress.

Ha, that's what I thought.

If gold possessed intrinsic value there would be no possible way to devalue it.

What happened in Spain is not only an exception. It happened in all western Europe, the abundance of gold made that the products in the international market went up doing that the countries that did not benefit from the colonization went bankrupt, this is one of the reasons why the Ottoman Empire declined.

There is also the example of Mansa Musa, who on his pilgrimage to Mecca causes the devaluation of gold from Mali to the Middle East, wiping out all the markets of the Mediterranean.

And of course, the fact that the American Indians had so much gold that did not give them much value, they also did not know its usefulness, so it shows us that the utility is related to the knowledge that humans have of it and to the human needs.

It's not a myth that the Spaniards bartered with the Indians to give them mirrors and trinkets from the old continent in exchange for gold. This might seem like a scam today, but it was not, for an American the mirror had more value than gold.