National economies? What ever happen to all that money*** I made*** in the nineties? Like me Spain and Portugal obviously wasted it on fine wines and high end courtesans. And like me they now wish they had settled for beer and cheap ho’s. Ahhh . . . misspent youth is wasted on the young. 
Can money spent on fine wines and high end courtesans really said to be “wasted?”
Truer words have never been spoken.
The OP is banned but still shows she’s online? How does that happen?
Which reminds me of an old joke.
A guy goes to his boss and asks for an advance on next week’s pay. “But I just paid you Friday! What happened to it?”
“Well, me & the guys did a bit of drinking …”
“So you spent all your money on booze?”
“No, there was some ladies too …”
“So you spent all your money one booze and women?”
“No, and I’m ashamed to say it, but the rest, I spent foolishly.”
+1 and +1
It takes a bit for user session-related stuff to work its way through the system. Soon Melchior’s session will expire and the board will automatically close the session; the circle will darken never to light again.
Either that or he will still come here and lurk, a shade haunting the board forevermore…
Spain at that time was the superpower of the western world so it definitely was one of the richest then.
Yet, it was as mentioned an example of the difference between just having a lot of money and being good at making and managing wealth. Spain’s superpower status in the 16th century was built on the back of having been first to a cash windfall based in straight extraction (of gold and silver), rather than on developing a true productive economy. Spain was like the star athlete/performer who’s top of the game/charts for a few years and a decade later is bankrupt, has had the cars and houses seized, and is doing obscure-cable-channel reality shows.
Wow, can’t believe the master got this wrong.
Ok, I’ve been doing some research recently on the gold market. There are three places gold is found: surface, mined, and chemical. Every historical gold rush involved surface gold: gold found in flake, rock, nugget or larger sizes within 10 feet of the surface. By they time you’re panning for gold, there’s very little left on the surface. Historically, a troy ounce of gold had the buying power of about $200 until the late 2000’s. At this rate, mined gold can still turn a profit as long as you found it in metal form. Once mined gold has been depleted, historically, this has led to mine closures.
However, in the late 90’s, gold price skyrocketed to 1k-1.8k per troy ounce. At the 1400/t.oz point, it becomes profitable to go after chemical gold, or gold in concentrations so small they are measured in parts per thousand. “Black sand,” or gold fused to other materials that must be chemically separated is a very expensive, time consuming, and painful process. At the current price of 1300/t.oz, it’s not worth refining for gold in this form.
Silver is millions of times more plentiful than gold. Historically, it’s been about $5 per troy oz, spiked at $50, and is now $20. The only reason it’s even that amount is its use in electronics. To get an idea of how plentiful it is, search for “junk silver” on ebay. Sterling (92% pure silver) is usually available in 5-20 lb lots. You can buy pre-65 US silver coins in $10k face value bags.
So to answer the OP: the initial gold rush most probably only involved surface gold, which is depleted very quickly. Silver, historically, has not had nearly as much value as gold.
There have been “gold rushes” before the 20th century that entailed mining vein or “lode” deposits, probably even during the ancient times. It doesn’t answer the crucial questions though: 1) where did the gold go and 2) why aren’t they the richest countries in the world today? For #1, the answer is it was depleted. Gold didn’t have that strong a buying power back then. Silk from China was worth its weight in gold. For #2, the centers of military and economic activity has long shifted from those countries. The present centers are the richest today.
This isn’t right on several levels. Firstly, historic gold rushes definitely included large amounts of hard rock mining. The Spaniards had vast underground mines worked with mostly slave labor. Various chemical extraction processes also date back to the 19th century, so they were definitely a part of historic gold rushes.
The surface gold (or placer, to use the mining term) deposits were the only ones that were concentrated enough to make individual prospectors rich. However, the bulk of the gold that actually came out of most gold rushes came after the individual prospectors had worked the sedimentary placer deposits all the way upstream to the igneous and metamorphic rocks that were their source (the mother lode). That hard rock mining and ore processing required much larger scale operations and so excluded individual prospectors, but it usually ended up extracting far more gold.
So, when you’re panning for gold, that means you’re in the early easy phase of the gold rush and the bulk of the gold extraction is yet to come!
It’s true that technology and economics are making more gold recoverable, but in the greater scheme of things there’s nothing particularly novel that’s come about in the last 100 years or so. Well, maybe if the processes of extracting it from seawater work out…
Also, a lot of mined gold doesn’t come from gold mines. If you’re looking for copper or silver, you’re going to get some gold, too, as a by-product. It might not be concentrated enough to be worth mining just for that, but if you’re already making a profit on the copper, it’s just gravy.