All the gold ever mined does not amount to very much.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21969100
What would happen to the price of gold if a gigantic deposit of nearly pure gold were to be discovered, say 10,000 tons?
It would drop.
That’s the only possible answer to the question that you asked, which I’m sure you already knew. Could you please come back and expand on the question to make it meaningful? A mere 6% increase in the world’s supply is a big deal for short-term pricing but wouldn’t change much of anything else. Gold currently has only some limited industrial uses along with a cachet in jewelry. Are you asking what happens to those industries? Not a whole lot.
I’m missing what the intent of the question is.
Actually, if we had a large enough supply such the price dropped sufficiently (and was reasonably guaranteed to stay low), I imagine we’d start using gold for electrical wiring and connections everywhere we could. Copper’s getting expensive.
The price and supply has us going to copper. Gold is preferable otherwise, including its electrical properties.
ETA: Of course, 10000 newly discovered tons probably isn’t sufficient for this to happen, as Exapno Mapcase rightly pointed out.
OK, let me ask this: how much gold would have to be discovered to make it as cheap as silver?
By weight, we’ve mined about 10 times as much silver as gold.
That doesn’t mean 10 times as much gold as we currently have is the right answer, but it’s a good starting place.
Mining production is running 700-800 million ounces of Silver per year. That’s about 25,000 metric tons per year.
With the global decline of photographic film sales, I am surprised that silver prices are so high.
http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/silver-bullion-photographic-demand-062120133
I’ve read that the relatively small amounts of gold found when mining other metals ends up being an important part of the profit from mining. So the prices of some other metals may go up in response to a large drop in the price of gold.
I’d always heard all the gold in the world is about the size of the base of the statue of liberty.
this is why you don’t go mine an asteroid full of platinum or whatever. you come back with a billion tons of the stuff and it’s suddenly worthless.
unless you can convince women it’s a sign of love. then you can apparently run a cartel that keeps the price inflated for decades, even when your product is essentially worthless.
I’m waiting for Caspar and Balthazar to start similar threads about frankincense and myrrh.
The Pebble Mine, a contentious potential mining project in Alaska, is estimated to be able to produce about 67 million ounces of gold, while also turning out some 55 billion pounds of copper and 3.3 billion pounds of molybdenum. Of course, it will likely destroy the local fisheries in the process, but hey. . .profit!
Yeah, $80 billion in Gold as a side effect of mining $180 billion in Copper and $30 billion in molybdenum… Seems pretty obvious as to why they want to mine there.
The Flambeau Copper Mine near Ladysmith, Wisconsin yielded 181,000 tons of copper, 334,000 ounces of gold and 3.3 million ounces of silver out of a 32 acre pit mine on a 180 acre site in a mere 4 years before closing down. Of course, 17 years after it closed they’re still having problems with groundwater contamination from the site. But this thread is about gold and silver, not pollution from mining (sulfides from the rocks dug up, mostly), and I only cite this mine as an example of gold and silver found as a secondary metal in copper mining.
Is there an official version of the Dwarfs of Discworld’s “Gold” song- that is, exactly how the words are pitched and inflected?
Thank you.
Part of the reason the BBC factoid is surprising is to do with cubes being slightly non-intuitive - all of the world’s gold would fit in a cube with sides of 20 metres, OK…
A cube with sides of about 25.2 metres would be twice as much gold.
Three times as much gold would only be a cube of 28.85 metres
It would, partly, depend on what country the massive lode was found in. Gold belongs to the country that finds it, and gold mining nations can sell or hold or speed up or slow down their production.
Virtually all the gold ever mined is still in existence as pure gold, since it is chemically inactive and does not occur in compounds. However, new silver has to keep being found and mined to replenish the loss in industrial usage, where it combines into various substances. For example, in the USA, only about 1/3 of industrial silver (photographic, catalytic, etc.) is successfully recycled.
Silver costs about $21 an ounce to mine, which is slightly above the current spot price. But silver mines also extract other ores coincidentally, which subsidizes the cost of mining silver. Gold is just a minor player in that economic.
And yet Silver production has increased by 1/3 while Silver prices have been this high. If you look at the 30 or 40 year historical prices, Silver is usually in the $5/ounce range. At that price, many of the current mines would shut down, but Silver production would continue.
In addition to traditional supply and demand, gold is seen as a hedge against inflation, a plan to gain great wealth, and a fallback position “if the world’s economies and governments collapse.” As a result of that, gold trading is driven partly by fear. A hiccup in world news can trigger a jump up or down in gold prices.
Great Antibob, gold has a lower electrical conductivity than pure copper. The only metal better than copper for wires is silver. Gold does have greater ductility than copper and doesn’t tarnish, so it’s better there. The non-tarnishing feature can be exploited by thin gold plating on contacts.
Only slightly, though, and that’s assuming equal purity of both.