Good luck with that. “Strategic resource,” remember? He’ll be lucky to get the land price, and every court in the nation will side with the government.
Just for fun, let’s say the guy who finds the gold in his yard lives on an Indian reservation.
Certainly the deeds on my suburban house in the UK specify that I only own the mineral rights down to a fairly small depth - I can’t remember exactly but something like 200ft.
I’m not sure who does own them, but I doubt there’s anything more than gravel down there (lots of gravel pits in my part of the Thames Valley).
Then the question gets a lot more interesting. 
Are you kidding? The Constitution says, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” There isn’t any words saying “except for strategic resources.”
Plus the fact that you misspelled “eminent domain” doesn’t provide confidence in your interpretation of the law.
Not at all uncommon for mineral rights to be bought and sold separate from the actual land itself.
The land owner isn’t without recourse though; while the landowners have to give the mineral rights owner access to recover their minerals, there’s nothing that says that they can’t charge an exorbitant fee to do, as well as put all sorts of stipulations in the contract about what they can and can’t do on your land, and how they have to remediate any damages, etc…
The idea would be to charge just enough to where you don’t deter them from mining/drilling on your land, but enough that you don’t leave money on the table, so to speak.
After Kelo, nothing is safe and you know it. Stop being obtuse. If all you can do is harp on spelling errors made before coffee, you have even less concept of things than I do. The Constitution means what the courts say it means. “Just compensation” is a flexible term. If 5 Supremes say $1.50 and a bag of Skittles is “just compensation,” then that’s it.
1 billion tons of gold will drive the price down so far his mountain will be pretty much worthless. Economies all over the world will be in shambles, and if he’s lucky the government will take the land off his hands at market value and turn it into the Gold Mountain National Nuclear Waste Depository, rendering that landowner’s find useless and patching up the world’s economy.
The first rule of Dig Club is You Do Not Talk About Dig Club!
The second rule of Dig Club is You DO NOT TALK About Dig Club!!
I wouldn’t tell anyone, mine and sell small amounts on my own, the stupid government can go sit and spin, my land, my property, nothing good comes of alerting any authority…
I don’t know about that. I think gold in the regard that you speak of is pretty much symbolic by this point isn’t it? Does any body really believe that for every dollar that exist in the world, there’s X amount of gold locked away in Fort Knox?
Since it is evident that you don’t have a firm understanding of the issues at hand, I’ll let your conspiracy theory-like interpretation of rather straightforward legal issues speak for itself and drop this hijack.
I’m with you, but in the OP’s scenario the landowner already blabbed to the entire world…meaning his life is pretty much fucked.
It would drive the price down so far that goldbuggery would be dead forever: 1 billion tons is 2 trillion pounds, which is 32 trillion ounces. Given that gold currently trades ad >$1200/ounce…well, you get the idea. There aren’t enough fungible assets in the world to value gold at more than a few bucks a pound if such a discovery became known, and pennies per pound would be more like it.
A billion tons of any useful mineral would still be worth a considerable personal fortune. Suppose the price of gold crashed to 1¢ per pound. He’s still got $20 billion worth of gold.
Why would this affect national or global economies? No major nation bases its currency on gold anymore; that went out back in the 1930s. People with futures contracts on gold would experience sudden changes in wealth - though which way would depend on which end of the contract they were on. But that wouldn’t crash anyone’s economy.
Remember Sutter’s Mill and the California Gold Rush? The sawmill where gold was first discovered was owned by John Sutter and James Marshall. Neither of them ever really profited from the gold rush. So it’s likely that the landowner in the hypothetical isn’t going to either.
Just to keep running with the numbers, Wikipedia says approximately 174,100 tons of gold have been mined in all of human history. So we’d have 5,700 times as much known gold in the world after such a discovery as before. Even if the price of gold was based on utility rather than whatever combination of hedging and goldbuggery, it would decline pretty drastically.
A billion tons of gold would take up ~53 million cubic meters, which if I’m doing the arithmetic correctly would get you a cube of gold about 575 feet in each dimension. A pretty damn big cube, but easily small enough to fit under one farmer’s 160 acres. (One side of the cube would be nearly 8 acres in size.)
Paved with solid gold, of course.
Story as I’ve heard it told went like this: The gold was first discovered by some hired hand, whose first response was to run into town, madly shouting through the streets:
GOLD! GOLD! I’VE FOUND GOLD!
THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR HILLS!!!
Smart. Really really smart. Exactly what the gold-endowed landowner in the OP is being told NOT to do!
That seems unlikely. As has been said, the simple existence of so much gold will crash the price. Why make themselves look bad for so little gain? Gold isn’t a strategic resource. Certainly not in this scenario, and not really in real life.
I wonder what the aftermath would be. If gold was cheap, how might it be used commonly in homes? For example, I suppose it would be too soft as a replacement for aluminum foil.
This leads to an interesting question: Is it possible that 1 million tons of gold is worth more than 1 billion tons, due to higher perception of scarcity?