Out of Every Element on the Periodic Table, Here’s Why Gold Stands Apart

Gold’s Long History as Money, Jewelry, and a Store of Value

For thousands of years, gold has played an outsized role in how societies store value. It has been minted into coins, shaped into jewelry, and treated as a symbol of wealth and power across cultures that never came in contact with one another. Long before modern financial systems existed, people continually turned to the same metal when they needed something valuable that would last.

That pattern hasn’t disappeared. Gold prices have nearly doubled over the past year and recently surpassed $5,000 an ounce for the first time. Even at that level, some major banks say the metal still has room to run. The renewed surge underscores gold’s tendency to regain favor during times of uncertainty. But it raises a simple question: Out of every element on the periodic table, why does gold alone enjoy this special status?

The Five Traits That Disqualify Most Elements

To answer why gold—out of all the elements—has been used as currency and a store of value for thousands of years, an episode of the economics podcast Planet Money turned to the periodic table itself.

Instead of focusing on history or tradition, the episode worked backward, starting with the entire table of 118 elements and asking what would disqualify a candidate from ever working as money.

Gaseous Elements

Many elements fail right away because they’re gases. Hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and nitrogen are some of the most familiar examples, but anything that naturally disperses into the air is nearly impossible to store, stack, or verify in a consistent way. (Helium can even leak out of sealed containers.) People can’t reliably trust these elements will hold value, and it would be difficult to use them as currency.

Elements That React Too Easily

Many other elements are simply too reactive to serve as a reliable store of value. Iron rusts, copper tarnishes, and lithium is so chemically unstable that it has to be carefully controlled in practical use, as anyone familiar with lithium battery fires can attest. Any material that degrades, changes form, or needs constant protection to remain usable is poorly suited for preserving worth over years—or centuries.

Radioactive Elements

Radioactive elements fail for a different reason: they’re dangerous. Plus, they don’t stay the same over time. Uranium, plutonium, and other radioactive materials decay, releasing energy. Anything that is dangerous to handle or degrades unpredictably can’t be trusted as a stable way of storing value across generations.

Elements That Are Too Common

Other elements fall short not because they’re unstable, but because there’s simply too much of them. Iron, for example, is everywhere, and silicon—one of the most abundant elements on Earth—is a major component of ordinary sand. When anyone can get their hands on a material with little effort, it’s unlikely to retain lasting value, no matter how useful it may be.

Elements That Are Too Rare

At the other extreme, some elements are so rare that they’re extraordinarily hard to find and extract. Osmium and iridium do exist on Earth, but much of what we have is associated with meteorite material, making deposits scattered. When a metal is that tough to locate and produce at scale, it can’t circulate widely or consistently enough to function as money.

The Metals That Come Close—but Fall Short

When the Planet Money team crossed out everything that failed the five tests above, almost the entire periodic table fell out of contention. Only five elements were left standing: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum, and gold.

Rhodium and palladium fall away first—not because of chemistry, but because of timing. Neither precious metal was identified until the early 19th century, so they simply weren’t an option for ancient civilizations.

Silver, meanwhile, is the closest historical rival to gold, dating back to the same civilizations that first put gold to use. But while it shares many of gold’s strengths, it has one persistent weakness: it tarnishes. And that’s more than a cosmetic problem—each time silver is polished, a tiny amount of the metal is rubbed away. It’s minuscule, but over time, it makes the metal a less than ideal candidate.

Platinum, like gold, is durable, scarce but not too scarce, and resistant to corrosion. But there’s one crucial problem: platinum has an extremely high melting point (over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which means it needs specialized furnaces to melt and shape it. This wouldn’t have been feasible for ancient and medieval societies, and is a stumbling block even today.

Why Gold Still Stands Apart

Strip every near-miss, and only one element clears every hurdle.

As Planet Money points out, gold’s advantage isn’t that it excels at one trait, but that it avoids the problems that knock every other element out. It isn’t a gas; it doesn’t corrode, decay, or even tarnish; it isn’t radioactive; and it sits in a narrow middle ground between abundance and scarcity. There’s enough gold to circulate and be widely recognized and trusted, but not so much that anyone can easily produce more of it.

Just as important, gold is workable. For most of human history, people could melt it, shape it, divide it, and reuse it with relatively simple tools. That made it practical not just as an abstract store of value, but as something societies could actually turn into coins, jewelry, and symbols of trust.

Gold has yet another practical advantage: you can easily test its purity without sophisticated equipment. Even today, jewelers check the purity of gold by rubbing it on a dark stone to leave a streak, then applying an acid to see how it reacts. Pure gold—often referred to as 24-karat gold—remains unchanged, while lower-karat gold or imitation metals dissolve under the acid.

Combined, these fortuitous traits explain why gold didn’t just succeed once, but keeps reasserting itself across centuries, cultures, and economic systems.