Comment by RajT88
7 days ago
Most likely. "If we could just make this shinier... we could be rich"
Alchemists probably weren't thinking about the gold economy, in that if they figured out how to turn something common like lead into something more rare like gold, that gold would no longer be rare, and they wouldn't be rich for very long.
The first ones to discover this would have been rich though. I doubt they cared what would happen to anybody else in the long run.