Should we go back to having currency back by gold or precious metals?
It would take all the gold in the World to back the amount of US currency in circulation (that might not even be enough to back it). If we just made all currency in circulation relevant in value to the amount of gold US holds? The value of the dollar would be a fraction of a penny to the dollar. I don’t have the exact figures, but it would suck.
I don’t even think if you had different denominations backed by different precious metals if US holds enough of those precious metals to back the amount of currency in circulation?
I’d say our currency is already backed by the most precious metal in the world: weapons-grade plutonium.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’d say our currency is already backed by the most precious metal in the world: weapons-grade plutonium.[/quote]
Damn!!! Very true, but Damn!!!
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’d say our currency is already backed by the most precious metal in the world: weapons-grade plutonium.[/quote]
That’s an awesome quote. Gonna borrow it if that’s ok.
Bitcoin.
I would think that we would need to have less currency in circulation to do it but well played, i did not see that coming.
No. We need more trustworthy governments. Fiat currency will always win out in the short term over gold when there is conflict between nations. Human nature.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’d say our currency is already backed by the most precious metal in the world: weapons-grade plutonium.[/quote]
I think this is the best statement I’ve ever seen regarding the reliability of our currency.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’d say our currency is already backed by the most precious metal in the world: weapons-grade plutonium.[/quote]
Our gold supply is finite, plutonium can always be whipped up. Not like a Betty Crocker cake though. It takes some doing.
[quote]beachguy498 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’d say our currency is already backed by the most precious metal in the world: weapons-grade plutonium.[/quote]
Our gold supply is finite, plutonium can always be whipped up. Not like a Betty Crocker cake though. It takes some doing.
[/quote]
There are untold trillions of tons of gold still buried beneath the surface of our planet, locked up in the oceans, and in the asteroid belt. Gold is not easily destroyed, so the amount will always increase, particularly as the cost of recovery decreases relative to the value of the bullion.
My implication, however, was that just as gold is considered the money of last resort because of its perceived intrinsic value, plutonium is the money of very, very last resort because the “full faith and credit of the United States” is enforced, shall we say, by our nuclear arsenal.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]beachguy498 wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I’d say our currency is already backed by the most precious metal in the world: weapons-grade plutonium.[/quote]
Our gold supply is finite, plutonium can always be whipped up. Not like a Betty Crocker cake though. It takes some doing.
[/quote]
There are untold trillions of tons of gold still buried beneath the surface of our planet, locked up in the oceans, and in the asteroid belt. Gold is not easily destroyed, so the amount will always increase, particularly as the cost of recovery decreases relative to the value of the bullion.
.[/quote]
Maybe trillions of ounces, but no way close to trillions of tons.
Just to compare gold to current currency. The total amount of gold mined all of last year on Earth, would not fund one US satellite launch into space. All of the gold on Earth mined from the beginning of time until today, does not cover the National Debt. Last years total value of gold mined does not cover the increase to the National debt for one week. The total NFL player payroll is around 1/4 the annual value of gold mined on Earth.
[quote]mbdix wrote:
Maybe trillions of ounces, but no way close to trillions of tons. [/quote]
There are nearly a trillion ounces of gold in the seawater alone, locked up as gold chloride. It is recoverable, but at monumental cost.
The gold we have mined from the ground represents the tiniest fraction of what still remains. Gold is quite literally stardust: the debris from the collision of neutron stars, to be precise. All the gold on our planet was deposited by meteorite bombardment billions of years ago, and the preponderance of that gold, being heavy, has migrated to the core. A geologist in Australia has calculated that 99 percent of the earth’s gold still remains in the core and mantle, and that there is enough of it to cover the entire surface of the earth to a depth of half a meter. The earth’s surface is 510 billion square kilometers, or 510 quadrillion square meters. One cubic meter of gold weighs 19.3 metric tons.
And we haven’t even mentioned the asteroid belt. It’s estimated that a single asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer could yield around 7500 tons of platinum-group metals, including rhodium, palladium, platinum and gold. That’s a pretty small asteroid: the largest ones are over 900 kilometers in diameter, and the asteroid belt contains over 9000 asteroids big enough to have been named.
So yeah, even a conservative estimate of the gold within our reach (if not yet quite within our grasp) is closer to trillions of tons than trillions of ounces.
Oh?
SpaceX can launch a low-cost satellite into low earth orbit for around 60 million dollars. NASA launched two new ones with all the bells and whistles for 715 million.
The NFL payroll last year was around 3.4 billion dollars.
The national debt is 17.6 trillion dollars.
At the moment, one ounce of gold costs $1,320. A metric ton of gold is 32,150 Troy ounces, which would be worth $42,438,000. Last year’s gold production was 2,500 metric tons, or 106 billion dollars. Enough to fund three hundred NASA satellites or pay every player in the NFL for 31 years.
It is estimated that 174,100 metric tons of gold have been mined in human history. At today’s values, that works out to $7,388,455,800,000.
So yes, not enough to cover the national debt. I will give you that. But then again, it costs money to produce gold.
Debt can be poofed into existence by magic.
I fucked up on the math. I had the est of gold produced at $112 billion. But when I did the math, I used $12 billion. Should have double checked myself. Thanks for the correction,
How I got 112 billion was I just quickly took 2700 tons x 32000 x 1300. So I knew it wasn’t exact to begging with. Then fucked up in taking 3 billion NFL payroll into (12 billion instead of 112)
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
A geologist in Australia has calculated that 99 percent of the earth’s gold still remains in the core and mantle, and that there is enough of it to cover the entire surface of the earth to a depth of half a meter.
[/quote]
An Australian scientist estimated that the 165,000-175,000 tons of gold mined in the history of man represents 1% of Earth’s total gold available? Do you know how he came up with that estimate?
[quote]mbdix wrote:
I fucked up on the math. I had the est of gold produced at $112 billion. But when I did the math, I used $12 billion. Should have double checked myself. Thanks for the correction,
How I got 112 billion was I just quickly took 2700 tons x 32000 x 1300. So I knew it wasn’t exact to begging with. Then fucked up in taking 3 billion NFL payroll into (12 billion instead of 112)[/quote]
You know what they say, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
[quote]mbdix wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
A geologist in Australia has calculated that 99 percent of the earth’s gold still remains in the core and mantle, and that there is enough of it to cover the entire surface of the earth to a depth of half a meter.
[/quote]
An Australian scientist estimated that the 165,000-175,000 tons of gold mined in the history of man represents 1% of Earth’s total gold available? Do you know how he came up with that estimate? [/quote]
From Discover Magazine:
[i]Earth formed from a series of smaller planetesimals that crashed together over the course of 30 million to 40 million years. [Dr. Bernard] Wood deduced how much gold ought to be present in Earth’s crust by comparing the crust’s composition to that of meteorites similar to the planetesimals. He concluded that the crust was depleted of gold, platinum, and nickel and suggests that all these iron-loving elements were pulled into Earth’s iron-rich core while its surface was still an ocean of molten magma.
In fact, if meteorites hadn’t later deposited gold on Earth’s surface millions of years after its core had fully formed and its crust had cooled, gold would be even more rare and expensive than it is today. Wood has calculated that 1.6 quadrillion tons of gold must lie in Earth’s core. This may sound like a lot, but it is really only a tiny percentage of the core’s overall mass–about one part per million. The core holds six times as much platinum, Wood notes, “but people get less excited about that than gold.”[/i]
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
[quote]mbdix wrote:
I fucked up on the math. I had the est of gold produced at $112 billion. But when I did the math, I used $12 billion. Should have double checked myself. Thanks for the correction,
How I got 112 billion was I just quickly took 2700 tons x 32000 x 1300. So I knew it wasn’t exact to begging with. Then fucked up in taking 3 billion NFL payroll into (12 billion instead of 112)[/quote]
You know what they say, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”[/quote]
haha.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Debt can be poofed into existence by magic.[/quote]
