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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

> 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.)

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>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.

>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.

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