101–104 of 104 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In practice, given that much of all gold is used to store value and is not actively in use, we do not expect the need to store it for 7–17 years to be a major impediment; at worst, it means that the product will initially have somewhat less value than pure 197Au, and so some discount should be applied to the value of freshly produced gold.
but when we are generating literal tons of gold for free, won't gold no longer be a good store of value because it will no longer be scarce?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In practice, given that much of all gold is used to store value and is not actively in use, we do not expect the need to store it for 7–17 years to be a major impediment; at worst, it means that the product will initially have somewhat less value than pure 197Au, and so some discount should be applied to the value of freshly produced gold.
but when we are generating literal tons of gold for free, won't gold no longer be a good store of value because it will no longer be scarce?
There are currently hundreds of nuclear fission reactors in the world so if you assume a similar number of fusion reactors, you'll get thousands of metric tons per year of gold production. World gold production was ~3,600 metric tons in 2022 [2].
So ultimately, yes, it would impact the price, but it will be many decades before we have hundreds of fusion power plants producing all that gold, and so it's not going to saturate the market for a long time. It may never saturate the market if demand for gold continues to go up in the coming decades.
1. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining#Statistics
Unfortunately gold generated in this way would be radioactive. They calculate they would have to store the gold for over 13 years to not require labeling as radioactive waste, or over 17 years to reach the level of radioactivity of a banana. I bet it would still be less valuable than regular gold even after that. It could still be identified, and people would discriminate against it. People are funny about nuclear wa…
This is not a problem for finance bros, they would sell a discounted note that gave you "ownership" of the gold in 17 years at some discount on the current spot price of gold. So you'd get these things that 'mature' in 17 years and you know their going to be worth whatever the spot price of gold is then, so it becomes a simple problem of pricing the risk that gold will be worth something in 17 years (people by gold f…