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Comment by drhagen | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting that gold was able to retain its value after the industrial revolution. It could have gone the way of aluminum, once twice as valuable as gold, but now used in disposable drink containers. At the time of the alchemists, there was no way to know that some metals were actually distillable from common rocks and others genuinely rare and impossible to manufacture with even quite advanced technology.

EDIT: Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway.

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I think gold's chemistry actually is why gold has been and remains a store of value.

It is rare, inert, malleable, has a low melting point and has a distinct unique colour.

All of these are quite useful for being a store of value:

- inert: gold from 10000 years ago is basically exactly the same

- malleable: it is easy to subdivide for coinage (compare with diamonds for an extreme example)

- low melting point: easy to purify (and melting temp is a decent purity check)

- distinct colour: less useful now but being so distinct from other metals makes it easier to spot vs the many silvery coloured metals

The funny thing is that all these store of value properties also make it less useful: inert means it's not reactive and has fewer forms/compounds

Malleable, lower melting temp and rare makes it a poor choice for typical metal usages...

>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.

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.

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 chose to call it aluminum instead of aluminium, thus leading to the split in spelling. That story may be apocryphal though.

>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...

The History Guy did a video on "The History of Aluminum": https://youtu.be/Nx16c6SB4kQ?si=jqaObtbTp3uNNjj3

From what I recall of the video, two people independently worked out the chemistry for cheaper aluminum. (I believe the video also mentions the source of the aluminum/alumininium name difference.)

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