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How much gold has been found in the world?

usgs.gov

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure if that's more or less than I'd expect. Most people "owning" gold in the world hold paper gold that isn't backed by physical gold. And the paper gold volume traded on a daily basis is several orders of magnitude higher than the physical one. So even if it's less physical gold than one would expect (I didn't check you maths btw), there's "more" to it than just the physical gold.

Do you have a source for that? At least the major ETFs seem physically backed? And just because trading volumes exceed available gold, this doesn’t necessarily imply that this is just “paper gold”

The term is 'rehypothecation'.

This is just the first result in an internet search for gold rehypothecation:

https://goldsilver.com/blog/what-is-gold-hypothecation-and-r...

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Currency fuels nearly $100 Trillion of global economy. 0.0000% of them transacted in Gold or Bitcoin 2) The fundamental property and requirement of currency is fast, seamless transactions. Don't confuse this with store of value. If you want store of value buy cash/dividend producing assets. 3) It's incredibly dumb and naive (all Bitcoin maximalists and Gold Bugs are) to ask currency to both act as transaction and…

> If you want store of value buy cash/dividend producing assets. Cash/dividends denominated in falling currency is not a store of value. Ie. a profitable business that takes revenue in and pays out dividends in Turkish Lira or Venezuelan Bolivar. Not an issue for those in west, but not everyone has access to stable currency/markets. > to ask currency to both act as transaction and store of value (those are opposite r…

A house bought in Turkey will always pay the rent-equivalent dividend (in whatever currency you denominate it)

A business bought in Turkey will pay the net-profit margin of the said business (in whatever currency you denominate it).

Both are inflation protected.

If you want economic risk protection because of inflation/hyper-inflation in your local currency, buy GOOG, AAPL or a broad basket of International Stock.

In a stable environment, using currency as store of value for anything more than 3 months is stupid

In an inflationary environment, using currency as store of value for anything more than a week is stupid.

Gold didn't act as store of value. Bitcoin didn't act as a store of value. Both are what it is --- speculative assets (not store of value).

If you really really really want a currency that acts as a store of value, of course there is the King Dollar, the greatest currency in the history of currencies.

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#63
post #21
post #16

Around 1/1000 worth of all printed currency in the world. Ppl complain about bitcoin, but fiat is the same.

As of 49 years ago; what does gold have to do with printed currency?

Now nothing, thats the point.

Printed currency value is pure speculation.

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put that into perspective, that’s only enough gold to bathe 3 metric Scrooge McDucks!

Does that mean that it's not enough to fill his money bin?

The Money Bin is said to be 39 meters tall, and 37 meters per side. Pennies have a packing efficiency of 57%, so a cube of the Money Bin's contents would be 2.5x the volume of the real-world's gold supply.

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#66
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely less than the world's total GDP, considering that China and the USA are both at or above that. So, it would not be possible for every country to have a gold-backed currency without a major decline in wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... (Disclaimer, I am in no way an economist :) )

I'm not sure there is such a direct relation between GDP and amount of money in circulation. The same $1 can be spent many times in a year and add to GDP each time. (I also wish we would stop thinking in terms of GDP, or that it's better to have a higher one)

Interesting! What would be a better way to think … or, what is harmful about GDP thinking?

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#67
post #4

All of the gold discovered thus far would fit in a cube that is 23 meters wide on every side. This is exemplarily clear communication from a government agency.

These are two volleyball courts separated by a traditional gap (in sports gyms).

Vertically that would be the equivalent of three floors (of the sports gym).

This is not a lot.

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want store of value buy cash/dividend producing assets. Cash/dividends denominated in falling currency is not a store of value. Ie. a profitable business that takes revenue in and pays out dividends in Turkish Lira or Venezuelan Bolivar. Not an issue for those in west, but not everyone has access to stable currency/markets. > to ask currency to both act as transaction and store of value (those are opposite r…

A house bought in Turkey will always pay the rent-equivalent dividend (in whatever currency you denominate it) A business bought in Turkey will pay the net-profit margin of the said business (in whatever currency you denominate it). Both are inflation protected. If you want economic risk protection because of inflation/hyper-inflation in your local currency, buy GOOG, AAPL or a broad basket of International Stock. In…

> Both are inflation protected.

Not sure about your logic here. The more exposure you have to an inflating/hyperfinflating currency, the more risk you carry. Your house holds value, but the rent in fiat you collect doesn't. Every month you collect X liras, but they become worth less and less. You're assuming you can reprice rent on demand, but contractually this is dependent on the locale.

> In a stable environment, using currency as store of value for anything more than 3 months is stupid

You only seem to be thinking in the single dimension of currency for the average person. You forget that all government treasury bonds (pretty big and important financial instrument in any economy) are denominated in some fiat currency. 10, 20, 30 year bonds. There are macro affects when people no longer expect or trust a currency to hold value. It is part of how debt crises occur.

> If you really really really want a currency that acts as a store of value, of course there is the King Dollar, the greatest currency in the history of currencies.

People think Bitcoin is a monetary experiment. But it really is the modern day fiat currencies that is the huge experiment.

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#69
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely less than the world's total GDP, considering that China and the USA are both at or above that. So, it would not be possible for every country to have a gold-backed currency without a major decline in wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... (Disclaimer, I am in no way an economist :) )

This is circular reasoning, because if the currencies were backed by gold, its price would skyrocket to fit the GDP. You can't compare price of gold as a speculative investment to price of gold backing an entire financial system.

What if gold creates needless friction that prevents a higher GDP?

For example, in a global gold reserve system it is possible for individual countries to run out of gold, possibly reducing their GDP to nothing. This happened way more often than you think and for many wildly different reasons. For example, the famous Weimar Republic hyperinflation was caused by an outflow of gold due to forced reparation payments that go way beyond what a destroyed post war economy could bear. The moment there was no gold in the country, the currency became worthless. Soon after that, just six or seven years later the great depression happened.

People argue that gold solved the inflation problem but all it did was swing violently from inflation to deflation and back. Only people who have too much money and don't need more money benefited from this, a bonafide market failure.

One would expect a market economy to allocate money to those who need it most but instead our economy allocates money to those who don't need it. Nobody seems to be aware of this contradiction.

Re: How much gold has been found in the world?

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Currency fuels nearly $100 Trillion of global economy. 0.0000% of them transacted in Gold or Bitcoin 2) The fundamental property and requirement of currency is fast, seamless transactions. Don't confuse this with store of value. If you want store of value buy cash/dividend producing assets. 3) It's incredibly dumb and naive (all Bitcoin maximalists and Gold Bugs are) to ask currency to both act as transaction and…

> If you want store of value buy cash/dividend producing assets. Cash/dividends denominated in falling currency is not a store of value. Ie. a profitable business that takes revenue in and pays out dividends in Turkish Lira or Venezuelan Bolivar. Not an issue for those in west, but not everyone has access to stable currency/markets. > to ask currency to both act as transaction and store of value (those are opposite r…

>This is how we got to a gold standard over some thousands of years.

We started with gift based economies where people keep track of favors in their head and after that ancient Egypt introduced a grain standard which did the exact opposite of holding value and it worked for thousands of years and encouraged long term investments like the pyramids as there is no point in making the rest of the economy wait eternally.

The Roman empire ran the first silver/gold growth pyramid scheme which forces it to conquer more and more territory to mine more silver and gold as they fail to circulate throughout the economy and lead to pointless economic stagnation. Egypt fell victim to this overexpansion and once the Romans ran out of easy territory to capture, they couldn't mine enough silver to pay their soldiers, forcing them to reduce the silver content of their coins. This is especially problematic if those soldiers are foreign mercenaries who are former refugees driven off their home by the Huns. Since there are plenty of privately wealthy people with gold and silver, they try their hand at playing Caesar and hire their own army, only to get killed by another self proclaimed Caesar or by their own men if they run out of money. Some Caesars tried to impose price controls by threatening capital punishment instead, with little success.

What we are looking at are two thousand failed years of permanent money. Madmen trying to do the same thing over and over again with the same expected outcome.

Honestly your whole argument has a pretty huge flaw and that one has nothing to do with store of value or medium of exchange but rather with a property that any successful medium of exchange must have. A medium of exchange doesn't need a high velocity or be a good store of value, those can be desirable in some contexts but they miss the essence of what it means to be money.

Money is an asset whose primary property is to be highly liquid. Liquidity is the ability to trade one asset for another. Money is effectively a joker. Money that is widely accepted is more liquid than money that isn't. Money that is difficult to handle and transport is less liquid than money that is compact and lightweight. Money that needs to be weighed and verified is less liquid than stamped coins or bank notes of fixed denominations.

Government approved money that can be used to pay taxes or loans is more liquid than privately issued money where people have to voluntarily agree to accept the currency.

If you build your money on a commodity, that commodity will need to be versatile and either be the foundation of your economy or have a wide variety of uses.

Not even money itself is perfectly liquid. A soda vending machine may not accept large bank notes or credit cards, meanwhile self checkout may only take credit cards and no cash.

These properties are independent of whether the currency retains its value or has a high velocity. Of course, extreme shocks in either of these properties may ruin liquidity but most currencies tend to limp along even with 20% inflation which according to you should be enough to ruin liquidity and make everyone and their dog switch to gold but again, dollars are more liquid than gold so people prefer those.

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