Oh the delicious irony, Mrs. ”Steal the Pearl”

I love this so much xD .

@archestereo  
…It was a joke.

@Scrounge
 
…why would you do that? Admitting that you’re a counterfeiter would be self-defeating.

@TexasUberAlles  
I’d think the function of a dog-flattener would to render dogs permanently flat.
 
 
@Background Pony #2E7A  

 
Would you get a counterfeiting cutie mark, or would you have to give it to yourself?

oh twilight never change

@Background Pony #2E7A  
The fact that a counterfeiting cutie mark is even plausible renders any anti-counterfeiting measures a waste of time and resources.  
I imagine gold is simply used as a fiat (or representative) currency, much like paper (or plastic) money is used on Earth.

@TexasUberAlles  

Perhaps the gold is not the valuable part. They could be using a Star Trek style currency.  

More realistically, we have to remember that unicorn magic was originally described as somewhat linked to a pony’s special talent, so unless you have talent in magic itself you’re likely not going to be powerful enough to replicate gold or turn other metals into it.
 
I suppose a caveat would be if you had a cutie mark in counterfeiting, but who knows if that’s even a thing?

@Blissey1  
it was a dog blow dryer  
Just because it used hot air to flatten dogs doesn’t make it any less of a dog-flattener. Whether you use compressed air to launch a circus performer out of a cannon or gunpowder to launch chunks of circus performers out of a cannon, it’s still a cannon.

@archestereo  
>But Musa’s generous actions inadvertently devastated the economy of the regions through which he passed. In the cities of Cairo, Medina, and Mecca, the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade. Prices on goods and wares greatly inflated. To rectify the gold market, on his way back from Mecca, Musa borrowed all the gold he could carry from money-lenders in Cairo, at high interest. This is the only time recorded in history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the Mediterranean.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali#Islam_and_pilgrimage_to_Mecca  
Gold prices throughout history have fluctuated a lot based on supply. In this example a ruler nearly destroy the economy of Northern Africa giving away too much gold

@Blissey1  
Perhaps it was a multi-function device?

@TexasUberAlles  
excuse me, it was a dog blow dryer, sir.

@Background Pony #00F0  
gems seem to be worth virtually nothing in equestria as well  
The CMC bought an industrial-scale dog-flattener with a fingernail-sized gem, so who even knows?
 
Clearly they have some kind of currency conversion scheme that’s based on plot relevance.

@TexasUberAlles  
Well, gems seem to be worth virtually nothing in equestria as well; heck, the CCG cards comment on gems being worth alot in the past before they came to equestria but became virtually useless once they got there.
 
So it seems like most all precious objects are virtually useless there as a currency.

@Background Pony #7C1C
 
@Yoshimon1
 
I think I’m to blame for this one…

@Background Pony #7C1C  
Huh, there actually exists an economics in the comments tag…

…Well, an economics lecture in the comments is better than drama in the comments, anyway.

@TexasUberAlles
 
…but why would they do that? If they can just make whatever they want with magic, then limiting that function would be directly counterproductive; it’d be like genetically engineering produce that can’t be mass produced on a farm and making that the currency.

@Background Pony #1DD3
 
This all might also be a case of writers not thinking about it all that much and we shouldn’t either.

I mean, ponies pay for single pieces of produce with multiple very large coins made of solid gold. We don’t know the exact purity of bits, but it seems unlikely that gold is worth the 1000+ dollars per ounce it is here and now.

@archestereo  
A commodity, on the other hand, is always worth something because it’s real  
Your own example kinda proves my point about the difference between scarcity and real value. The reason some of the older crown jewels of Europe were set in aluminum is because it requires a level of heat to refine it from bauxite which was nearly impossible to achieve before the invention of the electric furnace; now that electric heat is cheap, there’s so much aluminum in circulation that we discard it as garbage even though it’s nigh-eternally recyclable. The same thing would happen to gold if it were that easily mined/synthesized; it obviously has qualities which give it a much wider range of applications– and thus, yes, a higher intrinsic value– but on a planet where it was common enough at the surface, people would make plumbing out of it.
 
What I’m getting at is that ultimately any system of currency not based on direct barter is a fiat currency, because regardless of what you use as a standard or what numerical value is assigned to it, it only holds that numerical value as long as everyone involved agrees it does. Gold is really only a commodity to someone who has the ability to repurpose it into a form where its physical qualities can be exploited, like wiring or dental fillings or baubles, otherwise it’s just a shiny, heavy chunk of metal, and the only metals that really matter when it comes to setting currency values are lead and steel, because whichever entity has more bullets and bayonets is the one that tells the others what that value is.
 
I wonder what gold actually is worth in Equestria, given all the high energy magic flying around; maybe their bits are made of some kind of alloy that resists magic, so coins can’t just be produced by the bucketful by smacking a magic hammer on the ground or whatever.
 
@Keith Mowz  
you can’t counterfeit raw gold  
You can counterfeit bullion and billets all day long, it’s a thriving internation criminal industry; all you have to do is wrap a relatively small amount of gold around a larger amount of lead or tungsten and be out of rifle range before your customer tries cutting it in half.

@archestereo  

 
Er, what? Like all commodities, gold’s price is based on supply and demand. If you create a large surplus on the market, the price will collapse in an instant. There is nothing with intrinsic value in the economy, the price of everything is always in relation to something else.

SG: “We’re like twenty pages in! What’s the rest of the book?”  
TS: “It’s an anthology.”  
SG: “Oh. Right. Forgot about those. So that’s all there is, then?”  
TS: “Well, there’s the stuff that happens while she’s in jail, but I don’t think that part’s appropriate for Spike.”

@TexasUberAlles
 
Fiat money is a currency established as money by government regulation or law.
 
Commodity money is money whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made.
 
…that’s a pretty big difference; the state can literally declare debt itself to be money, which is actually less than worthless. A commodity, on the other hand, is always worth something because it’s real; there was a time when fucking aluminum of all things was valued more than gold, but we’re clearly better off now that it’s so accessible that we package sodas in disposable cans as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.

@archestereo  
I mean, like TUA pointed out, yes it does. But no, you can’t counterfeit raw gold. Gold coins, maybe, but just a lump of raw elemental metal, no.