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Comment by MagicMoonlight

2 years ago

That’s a hilarious idea. It wouldn’t surprise me if we did that. Find 1b tons of gold somewhere and start building houses out of it on earth

18 comments

MagicMoonlight

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bruce511  2 years ago

In medievil times Alchemy was the search for changing base metals (mostly lead) into gold. Clearly unimaginable riches would follow.

What they didn't realise was that turning lead into gold does not make lead as valuable as gold. It makes gold as valuable as lead.

This has happened before. Aluminium used to cost more than silver. The Washington Memorial is capped in aluminium for all of about 9 inches high, at fantastic cost.

Development of the Hall process made aluminium plentiful. It's now a cheap house-hold item we discard daily.

If we found a billion tons of gold, the value of gold would crater basically to the cost of actually bringing it to earth. We'd find uses for it (its pretty) but it'd make a terrible building material :)

  • onion2k  2 years ago

    What they didn't realise was that turning lead into gold does not make lead as valuable as gold. It makes gold as valuable as lead.

    Only if the process was commonly known. Alchemists were quite a secretive bunch. For example, if you asked most people to name a famous alchemist they'd probably come up with nothing, despite Isaac Newton being one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_stud...

    • TeMPOraL  2 years ago

      > Only if the process was commonly known.

      It doesn't matter - even if you're the only one to know the trick, once you start dumping large amounts of gold on the market, its price will start to go down. Gold isn't something that gets easily used up, so the more of it is in circulation, the cheaper it gets.

      7 replies →

    • bruce511  2 years ago

      It would have been nigh impossible to keep it a secret. Locally your sovereign would find about it very quickly. So you're working gorgeous the crown in a short order.

      Operational security was also terrible, so it wouldn't have been kept as a secret limited to one country for long.

      If you want to profit from making gold, you have to spend gold, and that's going to get noticed very fast. Its not like the common man was spending gold coins on a regular basis.

    • carlmr  2 years ago

      >Alchemists were quite a secretive bunch.

      But they'll surely tell it to their wife and kids at some point. And somebody should leak the recipe.

      >Isaac Newton

      Oh. :D

  • netrus  2 years ago

    This plot point in Goldfinger blew my mind as a teenager (spoiler: Goldfinger does not want to steal gold - he want's to make the gold in Fort Knox radioactive, to raise the value of the gold he has). If there is one important subject that is not that hard to understand, but poorly understood by the general public, it's how markets work. I know many well educated people who make trivial mistakes when thinking about markets.

  • Reason077  2 years ago

    > "What they didn't realise was that turning lead into gold does not make lead as valuable as gold. It makes gold as valuable as lead."

    Not if you're the only guy who's figured out how to do it.

  • carlmr  2 years ago

    I agree with your analysis, but the process might be the most valuable thing here, getting rid of lead.