I know people out there who have invested a lot in gold under the belief that in the event of like complete societal collapse or hyperinflation, they could use it for purchasing.
I have the hunch it’s a scam, but I haven’t learned enough monetary theory, business, or economics to understand why.
If it gets so bad that you need tools for building shelter, you are absolutely fucked unless you already have farmland and can defend it. People are massively ignorant about how difficult it is to live off the land if you don’t have experience in it and a lot of supplies and knowledge accumulated. It takes acres of crops and animals to support a couple people. It takes months or even years to make that land productive enough to keep you barely alive. Then if you have hard winters you better hope you have a stockpile.
Financial collapse is one thing, but a total societal/technological collapse would be bad in orders of magnitude that I don’t even know how to describe it.
Source: work in logistics.