
How to Make Convincing Fake-Gold Bars - chaostheory
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-03/how-make-convincing-fake-gold-bars
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marvin
I have personally spent a good deal of effort trying to find out how to create
convincing, counterfeit currency. I am reasonably sure that I have the major
points nailed down: you have to create your own paper (preferably after
chemical and visual analysis of the banknotes in question) and then get hold
of some ferromagnetic and fluorescent inkjet inks. Intaglio plates and
watermarks can probably be created through a photolitographic process. Color-
changing inks are the most tricky part..they obviously use some application of
interference, but I haven't quite figured it out. Holograms, for the
currencies that require it, can be created with an incredibly expensive
hologram machine, which is probably impractical.

You'd be surprised at how little of this information is available to the
public; most of the information I've gathered I've had to figure out by myself
from looking at the officially available information on the security features
of paper money. A more paranoid individual would suspect a cover-up. Perhaps
there are laws against discussing things like this.

If someone has ever read a good book on the history of counterfeit money, I
would be glad to hear it. To me it seems as if there is an information desert
on this subject - which just sparks my curiosity furher. Counterfeiting is a
fascinating engineering discipline, even more so in regions where the economic
loss is handled by vast entities (counterfeit money, if not discovered, is
paid for through the resulting inflation, counterfeit gold, if done properly,
would end up at the balance sheet of a central bank and hence the taxpayers of
the country in question, etc.)

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mhb
I wish I could remember where I read about it, but a common technique is to
wash the ink off real bills to obtain the genuine blank paper.

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marvin
Yeah, but that technique is obsolete now. Most modern currencies print notes
on paper of different sizes. I seem to recall that it was used to create US
dollar bills of a higher denomination.

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mhb
US bills are still the same size.

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wallflower
Gold is heavy. Reminds me of the movies like Indiana Jones where average-build
actors lift up gold bricks that should weight 80-100 lbs. each like they were
boxes of business cards

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pmjordan
At Gold Reef City in Johannesburg, South Africa, a theme park built on a
defunct gold mine, they do a presentation on gold mining and live pouring of a
bar of gold. At the end, you're invited to walk out with a gold bar if you can
pick it up by its sides with one (bare) hand. Last time I was there, nobody
had managed to do it yet...

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attack
I'd superglue my hands.

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Hexstream
(> (+ hands super-glue) bare-hands) => T

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dbreunig
Screw ad revenue! This is the new business model.

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mhartl
This reminds me of my least-favorite scene in my all-time favorite movie. In
_The Godfather, Part II_ , there's a scene in Cuba where they pass around a
'solid-gold phone', and the actors have to pretend that it's heavy. Alas, it's
clear from the way they handle it that the damn thing is just plastic, and
very, very light.

Apparently they should have made it with tungsten. I hope they'll remember
that if they ever make _The Godfather, Part III_. Wait... D'oh!

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johnrob
Yet another way to bootstrap a startup!

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JacobAldridge
Why go to all that effort when "The Gold Kit" will pay you for... gold
spraypaint!

<http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/goldkit/gold_kit.shtml>

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donw
As far as the theft of gold from the Ethiopian bank, an inside replacement job
is probably the only possibility. There is no way that all of the bank
officials, assayers/chemists, and so on could work together on that kind of
conspiracy.

Very, very interesting article.

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mrtron
Interesting article - however I am more interested in how to make real gold
bars generally speaking. Although I suppose the first step is making the fake
bars...

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marvin
If you could somehow create a cheap and powerful particle accelerator, gold
could concievably be produced in macroscopic amounts by irradiating
mercury-198 (10% by mass in naturally occuring mercury) with 6.8MeV gamma
rays. There are other ways of doing it, but economics and practicality needs
to be considered. It is probably easier to build a badass particle accelerator
than a nuclear reactor. I am reasonably sure that most modern accelerator
laboratories have done this experiment, but it is probably not economical with
today's accelerators. (And imagine the capital costs!)

This seems a very lucrative target for aspiring physicists. At a point in time
this will probably become practical, but there will only be a small window in
which it is economical to do so: once it becomes possible to perform large-
scale nuclear gold transmutation, gold prices will plummet due to excessive
supply.

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jcl
_once it becomes possible to perform large-scale nuclear gold transmutation,
gold prices will plummet due to excessive supply._

I suppose it depends on the economics and politics as much as the science. I
notice that diamonds are still expensive, even though we can readily
synthesize them.

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rrhyne
Always nice to have some backup 'gold' laying around in the event of a
recession. Heh.

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Tichy
I suppose it would be legal to fake one's own gold bars? Maybe that would be a
good idea. If shit really hits the fan, maybe you need the full fake gold bar
and are desperate enough to not care about the legal issues.

