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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Well sorta. In real terms, the price of gold is anchored to the amount of energy required to mine a kilo of gold with a sustainable margin. That quantity doesn't change very much (in real terms) over time.

Compare that to, say, American dollars, where we expect at some point (hopefully not in the next few decades) the government will lose its discipline and allow the dollar's value to drop to 0, its true marginal cost of production. My memory is the vast majority of governments have cracked on that score, sooner or later.

Really it reflects a belief in the as-observed-in-the-market marginal cost to produce, which is easier to think about than inflation. It also explains bitcoin and shows how important the large pool of mining power is.

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> the government will lose its discipline

We don’t have to wait several decades for that. The dollar lost about 70% of its value since the ‘70’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_dollar

> the price of gold is anchored to the amount of energy required to mine a kilo of gold with a sustainable margin

This ignores subsidies and tariffs. Those factors dominate pricing over energy equivalence.

> That quantity doesn't change very much (in real terms) over time.

That may have been generally true for the last 6000 years, but I doubt it will be true over the next 100 years; once asteroid mining becomes remotely viable then the price of gold will plummet.

Remember, we were supposed to have flying cars in 2000. I'd bet against viable asteroid mining for the next few centuries...

This isn't a good comparison. The technological ability for us to have flying cars has long since been there - VTOL vehicles have existed for some time now. We could easily create drones that could carry people, etc.

But flying cars have never been practical because of the human element and the lack of physical constraints that could readily be placed on their control. Plus, people realized that as ugly as a highway is, sky highways are a hell of a lot worse. The idea became less and less popular, and now there's no real demand for anything of the sort.

There's plenty of demand for precious metals. And the technology for asteroid mining, even largely automated, already exists. It's a matter of driving the costs down enough to make if profitable, or waiting until supply drys up enough that even if the costs remain relatively stable that it will still make money.

We already see a lot of progress and promise in launch costs being driven down. There's ambition within these companies to expand farther and do more. The technology is getting to the point where there's little question on whether it will happen, barring some sort of extinction of modern society type event, it's just a matter of how soon.

I don't necessarily expect asteroid mining to happen on any large scale in my lifetime, but, I also wouldn't be surprised at all if it does. In 100-150 years? I'd be surprised if it hadn't.

If young people in India stopped buying gold jewelry and start selling the inherited one i doubt your anchor would survive.

> Well sorta. In real terms, the price of gold is anchored to the amount of energy required to mine a kilo of gold with a sustainable margin. That quantity doesn't change very much (in real terms) over time.

Could you explain more about why it is the amount of energy required that determines the price? That could get rather circular (what determines the price of energy).

A Marxist would say it is the quantity of labour power required; a classical economist would say it is the balance of supply and demand, but I haven't heard this one about energy.

I mean that in the fairly basic sense of mining gold being a physical process; so it uses energy.

The point is that it is possible to bring a practically unbounded amount of new dollars into the market at a cost-to-create of 0 (ie, in real terms, new dollars can be created for free) and cause inflation. Which is exactly what the central banks try to do except in a controlled manner.

Can't happen with gold, because the marginal cost of creating new gold is roughly the price of gold. The 1-2% increase in supply from mining isn't going to cause real inflation in gold that behaves anything like inflation in the dollar. Supply increases to meet demand, but the value that the gold represents does not change.

If someone finds a super-nugget the size of a cargo ship to mine that might change, but that isn't what the original point by joe_the_user was going to.

You've failed to explain your original premise, i.e. it is energy that determines the price of gold. You've made some tautological points that get us no where.

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