Items that sustain life have intrinsic value in this world. Their relative values will change, but they'll never be worthless because they're necessary to keep people alive.
Lol how much do you pay for the air you breath? How much do you pay for gravity?
Obviously you don't understand the concept of value. Value has nothing to do with payments and money. Ponder this to help you understand it: I'll give you a choice between ten tons of gold or breathable air. Which would you rather have?
How about one-thousand tons of gold or breathable air? One-million tons of gold or breathable air? How much gold do I have to give you for your to give up breathing?
You're conflating value with utility. "Obviously."
Value is for things with numerical values. Even in the world of economics, the 'theory of value' is about attempting to "explain the exchange value or price of goods and services." (quoting the wiki 'theory of value').
One sort of utility of air for humans is its breath-ability.
In the case of gold, what is being talked about in this thread a lot is the difference between its industrial utility and its investment utility, and/or its closely related utility as a store of value.
It is a store of value because you can trade it for a cash price, and it is a good store of value because historically, it's generally not going to lose value i.e. demand a much lower price than what you would expect, based on what you've paid for it. To say that gold is a poor store of value because there are some notorious examples of when it failed to hold its value would require you to also define everything else as a poor store of value, if you wanted to be consistent.
Remedy the ways in which your 'gotcha' example is so ridiculous as an exchange and it should get you on the right track. How for example, would you propose to deprive me of air, if you gave me the 1000 tons of gold you offered? You couldn't. Your example is meaningless because it's not an exchange that can be made. I can't give you all the air I could possibly breath and thus can't enforce the basic terms of the deal. It's not even mine to give.
You also don't have the power to offer 1 million tons of gold, not even in theory. ~165,000 tons is all the gold that has ever been mined.
My points.
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Your head.
I guess in your alternate universe, nothing had value before currency was invented.
If I sell your sister a Hello Kitty stuffed animal for a blow job.... then what's the numerical value of a Hello Kitty stuffed animal in that transaction? See, you overlooked part the very line you quoted:
"Said another way, value is how much a desired object or condition is worth relative to other objects or conditions. Economic
values are expressed as "how much" of one desirable condition or commodity will, or would be given up in exchange for some other desired condition or commodity" - wiki
Currency has nothing to do with it. If I can get a cow for a barrel of oil, then the value of a cow is one barrel of oil. If I swap my place on the right side of the fence for someone else's place on the left side of the fence, then the value of a place on the right side of the fence is a place on the left side of the fence. You didn't pay anything for your right arm, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable.
Therefore, I don't need to pay anything in the form of currency for the air I breath for that air to have value. No one controls air so no one can
charge for it, but it very much still has value. In fact, the air has extremely high value because nearly any person interested in living would give up anything and everything to maintain that supply of air. The same goes for food, water, and anything else necessary to sustain life. Those items have real intrinsic value because they are absolutely necessary to stay alive. Gold has no such intrinsic value because when the industries that use it cease to exist, it ceases to have value as a commodity. When people decide to not recognize it as a medium of exchange, it no longer has value as a currency, because it's value as a currency/store of value (which makes up nearly all of its current value) is entirely subjective.
