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Comment by jansan | Hacker News Reader

Before 2008 quite a few people around me were purchasing physical gold. I even know of one guy who bought 20000€ worth of gold. AFAIK none of them had any idea afterwards what to with that stuff. I assume it is rotting (or keeps on shining) in their basements and will only be touched when they die or move out.

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One of the nice things about gold (one reason it is so valuable) is that it doesn't "rot" or degrade, like, at all. Naturally, it does not tarnish.

So unless you have a lot of aqua regia lying about in your house, it will remain exactly as is.

1. Pure gold will react with mercury and halogens. Yes, pure gold does "rot", just at lower rate, but still happens. 2. Most of the physical gold products, even at 99.99% pure, has 0.001% other elements which do rot too.

I bought a gold bar worth a couple grand just yesterday. It hardly takes up any space in my nightstand drawer. There’s no need to come up with an idea of what to do with it, it’s not like 20k worth of gold is a huge brick or something.

Just looked it up, if that one guy needs money today his 2008 €20k gold would buy him >€40k today. Not so bad.

Doubling your money over 15 years is a pretty low ROI. Even conservative investments are expected to double every decade.

That would be under 1 kg of gold. For that small an amount, there will only be a small handful of private buyers, and their offers won't be anywhere near the amounts shown on commodities exchange tickers.

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