It's somewhat arbitrary which precious metal we use, but it's not entirely arbitrary.
There's the usual reasons we use e.g. gold for money. It's fungible, ductile, rare and essentially impossible to forge. That rules out cigarettes and Yap rai as stable currencies.
As far as gold vs. silver vs. platinum, the inflation rate (i.e. the rate at which new metal comes out of the ground) is also important. Gold inflates slower than silver, simply because there's more silver in the ground.
As far as gold vs. platinum, it's important to look at what happens if the world decided to move to gold or platinum as a currency. Gold is already used as a store of value, while platinum isn't. If everyone moved to gold as currency, it would become far more valued. If the same happened to platinum, its value would go stratospheric. There are essentially no platinum reserves (compared to gold), so its price would be even more volatile, and its price would spike far more than gold.
Platinum is also much more concentrated, geographically. There are like 5 working platinum mines in the world, and like 4 of them are in South Africa. South Africa has more of the world's platinum than the middle east has of the world's oil supply.
Those objections are not insurmountable, but human civilizations have been using gold & silver as currency for thousands of years, but the same is not true of platinum. Don't underestimate inertia.
Comments
It's somewhat arbitrary which precious metal we use, but it's not entirely arbitrary.
There's the usual reasons we use e.g. gold for money. It's fungible, ductile, rare and essentially impossible to forge. That rules out cigarettes and Yap rai as stable currencies.
As far as gold vs. silver vs. platinum, the inflation rate (i.e. the rate at which new metal comes out of the ground) is also important. Gold inflates slower than silver, simply because there's more silver in the ground.
As far as gold vs. platinum, it's important to look at what happens if the world decided to move to gold or platinum as a currency. Gold is already used as a store of value, while platinum isn't. If everyone moved to gold as currency, it would become far more valued. If the same happened to platinum, its value would go stratospheric. There are essentially no platinum reserves (compared to gold), so its price would be even more volatile, and its price would spike far more than gold.
Platinum is also much more concentrated, geographically. There are like 5 working platinum mines in the world, and like 4 of them are in South Africa. South Africa has more of the world's platinum than the middle east has of the world's oil supply.
Those objections are not insurmountable, but human civilizations have been using gold & silver as currency for thousands of years, but the same is not true of platinum. Don't underestimate inertia.