rhodium

There's lots of metals that are rarer and pricier than gold, but you don't hear about scandium-bugs or rhodium-bugs.

Why should the dollar be pegged to gold and not silver, or platinum, or rhodium?

You might like the feel of a silver plated, rhodium-coated Varius carbon Caran d'Arche.

Gold is relatively scarce, but about 3-10 times more common in the crust (by ppm on Wikipedia) than Iridium, Rhodium or Rhenium.

That made them easier to damage, so they had to switch from gold to a crazy super-resistant rhodium-based alloy for contact coating.

In the past, you usually made them using precious metal catalysts (really expensive metals like rhodium; the reactions are easy to screw up).

That leaves us with just five elements: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold.

Wasn't it settled as aluminium to be consistent with spelling of other elements (~80 end 'ium'); selenium, rhenium, rhodium, sodium,...

Have we considered going on a silver or platinum or rhodium standard?

I also made sure that the white gold was made with palladium instead of nickel + rhodium-plating, since I was concerned about skin irritations.

Only 6 elements (ruthenium, palladium, rhenium, iridium, and rhodium) are rarer.

It reduces the efficiency by quite a bit but that's okay because it's a tiny effect compared to turning a huge chunk of Africa into a toxic hellscape to mine the palladium and rhodium the catalyst uses.

If it had been silver, copper, platinum, rhodium, or iron, I doubt they would have said "Oh well, we didn't really lose anything." The loss was real.

Rhodium: A non-reactive metal with characteristic shine, mostly used as beads in automotive catalytic converters.

Rhodium and iridium can become very valuable, more than they are now, if they're relatively impractical to produce cheaply using fusion.

Rhodium and iridium would be a lot more difficult.