Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

This just reminds me how horribly stifling it is to the entirety of science that so many people love hoarding bricks of gold in underground vaults rather than use it for productive purposes. Besides the maliability and corrosion resistance mentioned in the article, it is also a strong conductor, and very good at heat transfer.

It has so many practical useful purposes besides rotting in a bank vault. But a lot of that potential is wasted on those that value it so highly for its scarcity rather than its utility. Why can't we just hoard iron oxide?

View on HN

Another interesting story about precious metals in bank vaults:

During the Manhattan project they needed to build something with a ridiculous amount of copper coils, and copper was scarce due to the war. So they used silver instead. Who cares if it's more expensive, if that machine is going to be more heavily guarded than any bank anyway and you can always melt it back into ingots when you're done?

Since you bring up the Manhattan Project... Feynman described during the Manhattan Project they were testing different metals to find one with the right neutron properties. At one point they wanted to test gold, so they ordered a 6 inch gold sphere. The powers-that-be pointed out that the sphere would be 80 pounds of gold and would cost a fortune, but they ended up delivering it from Fort Knox. Gold didn't have the required properties, so the scientists ended up using the sphere as a doorstop for a while. The other interesting part of the story is the librarian who received the gold amused herself by asking people to move the small package for her - they failed, not expecting a small package to weigh 80 pounds; gold is much heavier than you'd expect.

http://articles.latimes.com/1985-08-05/news/mn-3468_1_manhat...

a question i like to ask bright kids - "do you think gold is approximately half as heavy, as heavy, or twice as heavy as lead?"

Gold is quite close to tungsten in density (19320 kg/m^3 for gold vs 19300 kg/m^3 for tungsten). The criminal mind has found use for that factoid: they coat tungsten bars with gold and pass them off all gold (after all, they come close to passing the Archimedes test). However, the speed of sound in tungsten is significantly different than in gold. This fact allows ultrasonic thickness meters† to be used to verify nondestructively that a gold bar is golden thru-and-thru.

†http://sensorsblog.com/uncategorized/counterfeit-gold-detect...

When I started working in Investment Banks, I was sent on an Introduction to Finance course. Next to me was an older guy (50's) with a massive bruised thumbnail. I asked him how he did it and told me he worked in the vaults and had dropped a gold bar on it.

> Gold didn't have the required properties, so the scientists ended up using the sphere as a doorstop for a while.

If I remember the story correctly, it was the door stop to a room that held fissible material - gold wasn't expensive compared to the materials they were working with!

What are silver and gold, when you're making enriched uranium?

They didn't take it out of the treasury, on a technicality: The room the machine was in was declared a bank vault, and 99.9% of the silver was recoverable, so it never really left!

Col. Nichols from the Manhattan Project went to the director of the Treasury and said that they needed to borrow 6000 tons of silver. Who replied frostily: "We measure silver in troy ounces here."

I think you need to show a connection between storing gold in a bank vault and how somehow, that affects it being used in scientific purposes.

I would have to guess that perhaps at most, 1 gram of gold would be needed for a space visor? The process involved in deposition must be considerably more expensive than the actual material involved (a gram of gold is about $44 at today's prices).

(Actually about 300 square feet can be covered by 1 ounce of gold (31.1 grams per troy ounce) I believe; so the amount would be less than 1 gram, but maybe they would waste some, etc. )

> I think you need to show a connection between storing gold in a bank vault and how somehow, that affects it being used in scientific purposes.

? This is supply and demand: the use as a currency/store-of-value is extra demand, hence the price is higher, and other users (like science) will demand less gold.

> The process involved in deposition must be considerably more expensive than the actual material involved (a gram of gold is about $44 at today's prices).

Which is ~$44 you wouldn't have to pay for another metal, and the penalties only get worse from there. (Want to manufacture a billion smartphones for Africa using efficient gold circuits? Sorry, not going to work out well.)

>Want to manufacture a billion smartphones for Africa using efficient gold circuits?

How much of that gold would we ever see again? (How much of the gold we use in electronics in wealthy nations do we ever see again?)

> (How much of the gold we use in electronics in wealthy nations do we ever see again?)

Quite a bit, I'd imagine: retrieving the gold is one of the reasons that electronics recycling exists.

Gold has a much higher resistance than copper.

>Which is ~$44 you wouldn't have to pay for another metal...

You wouldn't have to pay $44 for another metal because they are vastly more abundant[1], the consequence of which is that they are cheaper to produce.

Yes, demand affects the price too, but given gold currently costs over $32/gram to produce[2] (average, individual mines vary considerably), I don't see how the price is going to magically drop if it stops being used as a store of value.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth'...

[2] http://www.barrick.com/Company/Profile

The price drops because it rapidly becomes less scarce as hoarders of it rapidly sell it off for industrial use. See, for a similar case of a market flooded by a scarce good, the depletion of the strategic helium reserve floating away in party balloons the world over.

Gold is expensive because billions of people think it is worth hoarding. You don't have that percepetion with aluminum, so in a lot of circumstances where gold would act as a better substitute, you have to use the less efficient element regardless of physical scarcity because billions of people want to just stick that gold in a box and hoard it rather than use it, and that demand means an elevated price.

Gold isn't scarce because there isn't much on Earth in this sense. Gold is scarce because all the people hoarding it take that gold out of the market and there are billions of people that want gold not for practical utility of the element but to hoard.

I think the issue isn't what we are already using it for, but the things that we can't on account of its cost.

> rotting in a bank vault

I thought this turn of phrase was rather amusing, considering that gold is often favored because it doesn't deteriorate at all.

But wouldn't the resulting iron shortage just cause bigger problems? I mean, gold is great, but steel is really useful. Not to mention all that oxygen we'd be locking up, too. People might start suffocating! </sarc>

People should understand that a fiat currency is better than any commodity based currency. But they don't.

People are idiots and have let TV windbags convince them that a gold based currency is more "real". Shiny!

It is certainly something open to debate, and should not be stated so stridently, as a fact.

Debate can't really be had. Fiat currencies are better and more predictable... right up until they aren't. Which takes so long that hard-earned experience has long since diffused.

There's some investment debate but ethically, there's no debate.

It's simply not "right" to tie the value of everything in society to the value of a specific good. Gold, like all other goods should be free to have a value that is intrinsic to its uses (of which there are many in science and engineering) and other goods should not be subject to price fluctuations due to supply and demand issues related to gold.

Obviously, people have issues with their fiat currency issuer – especially since currencies tend to be a government monopoly and lots of governments abuse that monopoly. However, that's well outside the point I was making. In any case, that's not an issue with fiat currency per se but with government monopolies on fiat currency (something that currencies like Bitcoin have set out to address).

As someone that lives in a country that saw 2000% of inflation... Believe me, gold currency is awesome.

Iran? Argentina?

Until someone discovers a mine that doubles reserves over night. Gold can be just as bad as paper with modern mining technology.

Zimbabwe kicked their inflation problem by dollarizing. Note they have plenty of gold to mine in that area.

in ground gold reserves are reasonably well known and factored in. There is a finite amount of gold in the crust. There is no limit to the amount of digits one can add to the banks balance sheet. dollarizing won't be possible for the USD.

We only have estimates for unknown discoveries, and the margin of error is huge for those. Not well known at all. There is definitely a finite amount of gold in the crust, but no one knows how much, and even "knowing" how much China has locked up in their vaults is difficult (they keep it secret for obvious market manipulation reasons). Of course, we are less than a hundred years away from being able to mine asteroids, but I'll doubt we'll bother mining for something as intrinsically worthless as gold.

The US dollar is still a very stable currency, whatever the libertarian alarmists claim.

1. User A submits link to HN explaining the intrinsic properties of gold that are useful for space program at NASA.

2. User B lists a number of additional areas in science and technology that rely on the intrinsic properties of gold and bemoans financial system reliance on gold. Somewhat off topic and interesting discussion of fiat currencies ensues.

3. User C comments that gold is intrinsically worthless.

Great example of why I find HN so interesting and infuriating.

The value of gold in any of those technologies is only worth as much as the alternatives that accomplish the same effects. Gold as a concurrency is completely detached from gold as a useful commodity.

> The value of gold in any of those technologies is only worth as much as the alternatives that accomplish the same effects.

This is true for all materials and services.

> Gold as a concurrency is completely detached from gold as a useful commodity.

Is that your way of saying "I should not have said gold was intrinsically worthless"?

Sure, gold is not worth much as a commodity to be mined from an asteroid.

Do you even economics?

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-03-18/chinas-gold-...

surprising to see you read zerohedge AND have faith in the dollar's status as world reserve ;)

people have been telling us that probable in-ground oil reserves have been known for decades, but those estimates keep going up. I see no reason to believe there is a better estimate for in-ground gold reserves, nor do I believe the true size of those reserves is factored into the price. Considering the 40+% margins shown by Barrick Gold, I doubt even the marginal cost of mining gold is factored that well into the current price.

Gold currency was only ever a "promise" to pay. Banks could invent money out of thin air just as easily with gold-backed currency as with pure fiat currency, and banks did just that since the founding of the U.S.

Yes, it's really the relative merits of fractional-reserve, full-reserve, and other kinds of banking that we should be talking about.

> People should understand that a fiat currency is better than any commodity based currency. But they don't.

The way that fiat currencies have pretty much displaced commodity currencies suggest that this is actually a fairly widespread realization.

Well, they're obviously better for somebody.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

Well, it does lead to a stabler economy. Some people value that, instead of endless expansion and/or large crises.

Stable indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_crises#19th_ce...

Err, some of those are tied to stock exchange crashes, others to extended warfare periods etc. And all are tied with ever-expanding industrial production, which is another independent parameter.

I don't see your point here.

Hypothesis: Gold economies are more stable than fiat currency economies.

Expected observation: Gold economies have fewer economic crises and panics than fiat currency economies.

Actual observation: They don't.

Any recession is caused by "expanding production", the whole point of a recession is that it's a correction that happens after a boom cycle.

When did the actual observation that gold economies are not more stable happen?

The list provided only shows that they also have crises -- it doesn't show how those crises measure (respective to fiat currency economies) in magnitude, frequency and consequences.

Well, go on and make your point then. They seemed pretty frequent, consequential, and high-magnitude to me, certainly comparable to the 20th and 21st centuries (and even the Great Depression began under the gold standard).

Better for what? If you want to have stable money supply, commodity money is better. If you want to manipulate money supply in order to achieve political purposes - of course fiat money is better.

BTW, if fiat money are so great and gold money is so inferior, why exactly the government snatched the private gold in the 30s[1]? Did they want the inferior thing so much that they had to force people to give it up because they wouldn't voluntarily exchange it for the much better thing? I imaging they were rescuing those people, that's what it was. A sacrificial act by the Feds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

The gold standard wasn't as "stable" as you think. There were severe inflation crises during the California and Alaska gold rushes, while the Nevada silver rush made bimetallism untenable.

Your other argument is incoherent--there's no fundamental reason to build monetary policy such that it favors individual investors over the health of the economy as a whole. In fact, if people simply hoard money rather than spending and investing it, that's generally an indicator of a poor economic system that can cause the type of deflationary spirals that caused the Great Depression in the first place.

Not sure if your serious or not...

Here's an absolutely classic piece from the austrian view point. Take a read, it might expand your narrow views even if you don't agree!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Monetary-West-Jacques-Rueff/dp/B00...

https://mises.org/books/monetarysin.pdf

> Why can't we just hoard iron oxide?

Because it isn't scarce.

A more elaborate answer:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/15/131430755/a-chemis...

You can buy gold on the open market and use it as you wish. I think the important uses for gold can use small amounts, like gold plating electrical connections. There's no use for bulk gold that justifies the cost.

Is there not a way to synthesize gold, like how diamonds can be synthesized (obviously a different process.) I searched around, and I guess there isn't a good process for this, yet.

Also, how much could NASA really be spending on gold, anyway? They're already spending billions on the rest of their space program.

The search term you're looking for is "alchemy"

While the other answer made me laugh, the reason is because gold is an element. Diamonds can be manufactured because they are made out carbon, and carbon and cheap and plentiful.

You either have gold or you don't. Alchemy tried to convert elements into other elements which is nearly impossible (The sun and other nuclear reactions do this, but not directly to specific elements).

Sure, you just need a particle accelerator. It's absolutely nowhere near practical, let alone cost effective.

Gold, being an element, needs nuclear processes for manufacture instead of chemical processes (like diamond). Before modern particle accelerators, this was flatly impossible, and even today, it is very, very hard and expensive. The cost to produce an amount of gold like this is millions of times more than it's value.

Somewhat interestingly, gold is actually being actively destroyed in particle accelerators, as it has several properties that makes it a desirable target. As my professor once put it, we finally have the secrets the alchemists only dreamed of, and we use them to destroy gold.

I have a rather vague recollection that gold has been transmuted from other elements in experimental (fission, I presume) reactors as well, although the best reference I can find right now is [1]. Accelerators do seem to be the modern/"practical" approach though.

Which properties in particular make it a good target?

Edit: more details from wikipedia[2] suggest starting from either mercury or platinum, although it's all a bit fiddly and isotope-specific. That page has some other interesting facts as well - I'd never really thought of element synthesis as economically practical (and with capital equipment costs, probably still isn't), but tungsten ($30/kg) -> rhenium ($6k/kg) -> osmium ($12k/kg) sounds like a nice business to be in if you can solve the practical problems.

When the balloons all run out, we might want to start making our own helium as well, which has the bonus of being really quite easy to do.

[1] http://chemistry.about.com/cs/generalchemistry/a/aa050601a.h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

Gold has a large cross section, which basically means it presents a big target (amusingly such measurents are made in units of 'barns'). It's also stable, so you don't have to worry about natural decay events polluting your data.

> Is there not a way to synthesize gold, like how diamonds can be synthesized (obviously a different process.)

To convert other forms of carbon into diamond, you just need to simulate the conditions in which diamonds are formed (heat and pressure inside the earth.)

To convert other elements to gold, you just have to simulate the conditions in which gold is formed, which, as a heavy element, I'm pretty sure is reproducing a nuclear process that occurs in large stars or possibly supernovae, i.e., something you can reproduce only on Earth only on a very small scale using particle accelerators (or maybe nuclear weapons.)

Actually, only a supernova or equivalent energy magnitude event.

Fusion only releases energy up to iron. Creating heavier elements consume energy in the reaction rather than releasing it, therefore cannot sustain a reaction.

There are a tiny number of ways but they're all so fantastically expensive it's pointless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...

Fission goes the opposite way. Heavier elements than iron release energy.

I think the inside of a star is not perfectly clear-cut. Various elements get created and cycle, with only the energetically-favorable ones accumulating. It's not altogether unlike chemistry.

What little I know of this comes from wikipedia, but I think there are other ways to synthesize elements apart from fission and fusion. Sometimes they simply catch a neutron, and the decay of a particle produces a different element.

> Is there not a way to synthesize gold, like how diamonds can be synthesized ...

Diamonds are a form of carbon, all you need is a different form of carbon and sufficient pressure. Gold is an element, and creating it requires a supernova. Were this not so, if gold could be synthesized, it wouldn't be selling for $1300/ounce.

> if gold could be synthesized, it wouldn't be selling for $1300/ounce.

That's not by itself true. If gold could be synthesized for less than $1300/ounce, then it wouldn't be selling for $1300/ounce. As noted in sibling comments, it is possible to synthesize. It's just unreasonable to actually do so in any meaningful quantity.

Let me amend my original claim: "If gold could be synthesized with something other than a multi-billion-dollar accelerator and produce daily yields greater than nanograms ..."

Heh, people have been trying to do it for more than 1000 years I think :-)...

I concur, it would be much better put to use coating DeLoreans... for science!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com