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A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

economist.com

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Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#61

Post by 3form »

mplanchard wrote: post #24
3form wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway. I think also the scarcity plays a factor, the estimates that I'm seeing after short search being that there's about 10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold.

This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.” The cap on the washington monument is aluminum, because at the time it was still a precious metal. The guy who figured out how to electrolyze it out of ore went on to create the main company in the US that produced it, and chos…

>This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.”

Sure, but it also said "it could have gone the way of aluminum", which is mostly where my point rests: I don't really see how. The disparity of volume seems to explain it to me fully.

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#62

Post by mikewarot »

> Its well-documented contributions to deflationary and financial crises, including the Depression, go curiously undiscussed in this book.

Why is deflation viewed as such a bad thing? If you've got savings in a deflationary time, your money becomes more valuable, not less. Don't we want to encourage savings?

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#63

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mikewarot wrote: post #62

> Its well-documented contributions to deflationary and financial crises, including the Depression, go curiously undiscussed in this book. Why is deflation viewed as such a bad thing? If you've got savings in a deflationary time, your money becomes more valuable, not less. Don't we want to encourage savings?

If you have debts instead of savings, deflation is utterly ruinous. An awful lot of people have debts.

Deflation does far more damage than inflation. This is why the Federal Reserve fears deflation a lot more than deflation.

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#64

Post by AnimalMuppet »

pjc50 wrote: post #23
3form wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway. I think also the scarcity plays a factor, the estimates that I'm seeing after short search being that there's about 10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold.

There is now , but it wasn't really extractable at all until electrochemistry.

Right, but it was still there to extract. All it needed was electrochemistry.

Whereas with gold, it isn't there in the rocks - not in the same amounts. No future chemical wizardry is going to make it extractable, because it isn't there to extract.

To make gold more abundant is going to take transmutation, which is a much bigger ask.

Now, if you want to say that the ancients didn't know that aluminum was there and gold wasn't, and therefore lucked out by picking the one that wasn't there, I would agree with that.

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#65

Post by KetoManx64 »

luka598 wrote: post #48
KetoManx64 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than gold in what aspect? Good luck trying to move to a different country and bringing all your gold with you without filling out a hell of a lot of forms and risking confidcation for "money laundering". Bitcoin doesn't have this problem The supply of gold is always inflating. One day we will have asteroid mining of gold and it will be inflated even more. Bitcoin doesn't have this problem. Nobody will accept y…

Doesn't bitcoin have a big potential problem of someone breaking asymmetric cryptography.

Bitcoin is a protocol which has evolved over time to meet the needs of its users. In the next decade or so, Bitcoin will have a soft fork to deal with the problem of quantum computers.

Even if a state actor manages to break the asymmetric cryptography before then (literally impossible to get enough compute power to do this currently), the users can just fork the blockchain before that happens, fix the bug, and continue on.

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#67

Post by Paradigm2020 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #20
carlosjobim wrote: post #5

Name one thing in the universe which is better than gold? Tip: You can't.

Per gram you can sell printer ink for more.

You have not followed the gold price over the last couple of years... Definitely not true anymore.

A quick search says maybe the last year it was true was in 2003.

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#68

Post by mplanchard »

3form wrote: post #61
mplanchard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.” The cap on the washington monument is aluminum, because at the time it was still a precious metal. The guy who figured out how to electrolyze it out of ore went on to create the main company in the US that produced it, and chos…

>This is because of what the comment you’re replying to was saying. Aluminum was a scarce resource prior to the electrolytic process being invented that made it “distillable from common rocks.” Sure, but it also said "it could have gone the way of aluminum", which is mostly where my point rests: I don't really see how. The disparity of volume seems to explain it to me fully.

Sure, I guess just “disparity of accessible volume” being the key thing.

If we found a way to extract gold from seawater[0], for example, it would change the accessible volume of gold quite a bit.

[0]: https://www.discovermagazine.com/6-times-we-tried-to-extract...

Re: A new book about humanity's obsession with gold

#69

Post by mplanchard »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #64
pjc50 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is now , but it wasn't really extractable at all until electrochemistry.

Right, but it was still there to extract . All it needed was electrochemistry. Whereas with gold, it isn't there in the rocks - not in the same amounts. No future chemical wizardry is going to make it extractable, because it isn't there to extract. To make gold more abundant is going to take transmutation, which is a much bigger ask. Now, if you want to say that the ancients didn't know that aluminum was there and go…

The GGP said “10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold,” which the “processed” part, which is I think what GP was responding to: of course the scarcity of available gold relative to aluminum drives its value, but that relative scarcity only exists due to modern electrochemistry: previously, “processed” aluminum and gold were similarly scarce.

People talk about stuff like extracting gold from seawater, so it also isn’t a given that the scarcity difference will always remain what it is.

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