What is more likely, that your friend knows all about thousands of tons of secrete gold mined without anyone knowing, or that with constant satellite pictures of the earth, people actually do know roughly how much gold has been mined?
And I know someone with a stash of 100000000 bitcoins. The yield of gold mines is known, and it's pretty easy to extrapolate into the past.
I understand where all these conspiracies come from. It typically starts with "there must be enough gold to back all the savings, because Bretton-Woods or something". Then they check the total cost of the world's gold. It's a small fraction of the total savings.
So obviously most of the gold is hidden somewhere.
I guess it’s the sort of thing that encourages secrecy even into the far past — from both the takers and those from which it was taken from. How to know mining yields and extrapolate past mining?
But after some research, I’m convinced. We mine a lot more gold today than in the ancient past. Not much more gold left to mine, though — at current rates, we are done in 20 some years! I find that also hard to believe, but so it goes.
We mine a lot more gold today than in the ancient past. Not much more gold left to mine, though — at current rates, we are done in 20 some years! I find that also hard to believe, but so it goes.
We're not going to stop mining gold in 20 years. That's probably an estimate derived by dividing known reserves by current production rates. But that number is just an artifact of how "reserves" are defined. See this publication from the United States Geological Survey:
"Mineral Reserves, Resources, Resource Potential, And Certainty"
Reserve: That portion of an identified resource from which a usable mineral or energy commodity can be economically and legally extracted at the time of determination.
Miners continually quantify geological features to turn them into known "reserves." Some identified ore bodies also get converted into reserves by rising commodity prices or improved extraction techniques. No new ore bodies have formed in the past 60 years, but new reserves have continually been identified.
This misunderstanding is why people keep (wrongly) predicting that the world will run out of e.g. indium; even people who are otherwise educated make this mistake:
"Augsberg University Calculate When Our Materials Run Out - Soon" (June 4, 2007)
Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg in Germany, and his colleagues are among the few groups who have been investigating the problem. He estimates that we have, at best, 10 years before we run out of indium.
