It’s brave to assume the gold is still there. Nobody checks it; last time they did, a bunch of bars were made of tungsten.
If you’re someone guarding the gold, you’d have to be stupid not to replace it with tungsten. A single bar is a lifetime of wages. It’s not like anyone will ever notice, it’s a reserve that will never be spent.
You can't just walk in and out carrying 12kg bars. Also I don't think you can just buy a bar of tungsten, you gotta smelt it, coat with gold, not trivial. That kind of operation would involve a lot of cooperating people. You also need to convert gold to dollars which might not be as trivial as you think.
So maybe that happens, but it's a lot more complicated. And, of course, there are measures against that happening.
It’s a long time gold bug conspiracy theory. There was a case of a Canadian bar that came from a bank that had a tungsten core but there was a huge outcry about that and it was decades ago.
Chinese gold has been tungsten spiked, fairly often actually, but it’s a known fraud vector there so is broadly audited.
Korea was wiped off the map… until the Chinese arrived with nukes and millions of soldiers. That wasn’t a Korean victory.
Vietnam was wiped off the map… until the Chinese arrived with millions of soldiers. The Vietcong had something like a 99% yearly casualty rate. They were completely obliterated every year of fighting, but more villagers were simply conscripted and sent forward into the napalm.
The US military is the world's best killing machine, but the US as a country cannot win a war. These are different things. Hell, I'd say it didn't even win the first civil war. And with the bullshit that has been perpetrated on the world in the last year, it might not be possible for the US to ever win another one.
> Of course Google is going to back door their browser.
Aside from the fact that other browsers exist, this makes no sense because Google would stand to gain more by being the only entity that can surveil the user this way, vs. allowing others to collect data on the user without having to go through Google's services (and pay them).
If you’re someone guarding the gold, you’d have to be stupid not to replace it with tungsten. A single bar is a lifetime of wages. It’s not like anyone will ever notice, it’s a reserve that will never be spent.
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