Science of the Gold Standard

President Harry Truman once asked why you would ever want "a system in which you pay people to dig things out of the ground and then bury them in the ground again?" NPR's Planet Money asked a similar question in a recent podcast in which they give an element by element breakdown of why gold has been used for thousands for years as the medium exchange all over the world. For obvious reasons the unit of exchange shouldn't be a gas, corrode, explode, too rare, or kill you. Those simple requirements eliminate 116 of the 118 elements, leaving just platinum and gold. And unless you have a furnace that can heat up to 3,000 degrees, you can't melt platinum. So out of all the elements, gold is the clearly the best to use as a standard. Well, that is, except for trust.