Here’s an interesting new form of gold bullion called a CombiBar from Valcambi, a company in Switzerland that clearly thinks there might be a need for this sort of thing someday. There’s a slideshow from Rediff showing how the bars are fabricated and used, from which the image below was pulled.
Valcambi provides a detailed description about how to break off the little bars along with more photos and, under the right circumstances, I can see how this sort of thing might really be practical.
The big bar costs almost $3,000 (it’s almost 2 ounces of gold) and has 50 little bars, each weighing a gram and, at today’s gold price, that works out to be somewhere around $60 for each little bar, a fairly convenient dollar amount for ordinary purchases such as gasoline or groceries.