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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

But we do create more of it (or dig it out of the ground and refine it, as it were), there's simply a practically finite rate at which we can grow the gold supply.

So the value of gold should in fact deflate over time, as we produce more and more of it.

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No, we mine it. We may discover more of it. But in ground reserve quantities are generally factored into the price of the stock of gold mining companies. So it is rather finite, and the more we explore and mine, the less likely we would be to discover more of it. Until someone invents the Philosopher's Stone.

No, we don't. No matter how you look at this, gold is not "created". Cold is extracted from gold mines, the only thing humans can do it try to find, but they simply can not create it.

Key here is that the total amount of gold on this planet is finite - not the production or extraction rate - making it truly valuable. Same thing applies to other natural resources such as oil, natural gas and diamonds.

Wait, you can grow diamonds in a laboratory.

But Carbon is finite, too. (And on the same note, Dollars are finite, too. We have to store the bits somewhere.)

>We have to store the bits somewhere.

+1 for the fine, fine irony. Intended or otherwise as it might have been.

>but they simply can not create it.

I seem to remember reading that that's not the case anymore. As in, we actually can make gold through transmutation. The amount of energy required to do so is bigger than the "value" of the resultant gold tough.

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