If gold were valued only for its practical uses, how much would it be worth?

Tomorrow, everybody on the planet decides that we should no longer use gold as a store of value.

Of course, the physical properties of gold haven’t changed, so it still has quite a few applications in industry, electronics, and probably other fields.

Is there a ballpark figure for how much gold would cost?

It says here that world gold consumption is at approximately 1,050 tonnes, with 540 tonnes going for investment purposes, and 516 tonnes for jewelry and industrial uses.

Now I realize those two figures add up to more than 1,050, so that makes everything else a little suspect. But for the sake of the thread, let’s just say half.

Does “it’s shiny and pretty” count as a practical use? Because that’s the main reason it ends up in jewelry.

Other than that, the main practical properties I can think of:

1: It’s extremely dense. Lead’s mostly useful for its density, and gold is close to twice the density of lead, so if nothing else, I’d expect it to be worth more than lead is.

2: It’s extremely corrosion-resistant. Unless you’re going all-out with substances just for eating away at gold, it’s not going to succumb to anything. The same property, incidentally, makes it really easy to electroplate onto surfaces.

3: It’s extremely ductile and malleable. You can draw it into wires or flatten it into sheets that are much thinner than any other metal. Aside from a few specialized scientific experiments like Rutherford’s gold foil, though, I’m not sure what one does with this.

4: It’s a very good conductor. It’s not actually quite as conductive as copper or silver, but combined with the corrosion-resistance mentioned above, it’s a very good choice for electrical contacts.

Most of the platinum group metals are quite pricey. (Rhodium, I seem to remember is quite a bit more expensive than gold.)

They share a lot of characteristics with gold, eg corrosion resistance, density, rarity.

Is that strictly true? Surely in antiquity “it’s shiny and pretty” is how it ended up being valuable in the first place, but these days without the conspicuous consumption/value storage aspect of it what advantage would real gold have over the faux-gold you see in costume jewelry, for example? Plus even if there’s nothing else that’s quite as shiny and pretty, wouldn’t gold-plated jewelry work just as well as solid gold?

Gold is definitely pretty. But I would guess (I could be wrong) that a huge amount of its appeal for use in jewelry is the fact that it’s a store of value, and if you can use it for something as frivolous as personal decoration, that’s a pretty good way to show off how rich you are.

I would guess that if we stopped treating gold as a store of value, its appeal for use in jewelry would be greatly diminished, though certainly not completely eliminated.

Just to expand on what I said before.

Iridium, Osmium and Palladium are all 1/3 the price of gold. I don’t believe they are used as store of value, and only Palladium is used in jewelry - and then only rarely. This would probably be the baseline price of gold.

Also, if we follow the OP literally that overnight we decide gold is only useful industrially, it would probably become pretty close to worthless for a long time since there’s such a huge volume of the stuff sitting in people’s jewelry drawers, pawn shops and government vaults that they’d be wanting to get rid of ASAP.

If we re-work the hypothetical to be that gold has never been valued and mankind hasn’t spent millenia compulsively hoarding it (and waging wars and enslaving his fellow man for it for it and all that) and nobody really thinks of a use for it until 50 years ago, I’m not so sure. My first instinct was that if all the relatively easy-to-find gold that was mined in antiquity and in the various colonialist-era gold rushes hadn’t been mined, we’d still be mining those and gold would be really cheap.

But comparing the total yield from some of these historic gold rushes and modern production and usage, that doesn’t really pan out (yuk yuk). For example, the California gold rush only pulled out about 370 tons, which if kunilou’s link is right wouldn’t even satisfy industrial/jewelry demand for a year. The Klondike only yielded 390. Maybe they’d hold out for 2 or 3 decades, but once you use up the easy-to-mine placer deposits, you’re into hard rock mining, which is expensive and, for something like gold that usually occurs in low concentrations, only profitable if the price is relatively high. So I’d agree with blue infinity’s conclusion that the price would be comparable to one of the cheaper PGM’s.

It’s my understanding that most gold mined nowadays actually comes from copper mines. It’s the much more common copper that keeps the mines profitable, and any gold they happen to come across is just a bonus. And copper, of course, is in fact valued pretty much entirely for its practical uses (nowadays, mostly its high conductivity).

As for jewelry as conspicuous consumption vs. decoration, I’ll point out that there’s a lot of jewelry that’s just gold-plated, and that therefore has very low metal value, but is still just as pretty as solid gold. One might still argue that this is intended to fool people into thinking that it’s conspicuous consumption, but I think the “it’s pretty” explanation is the simpler one.

Well, that’s definitely true in our neck of the woods-- the gold that’s produced incidental to the copper in the big open pit mine that’s still operating in Butte dwarfs what’s coming out of the few puny gold operations still running in the state. But that’s mostly because gold mining simply isn’t practical in Montana because cyanide heap leaching isn’t allowed. I don’t think it’s true world-wide, though. In the US, most of the gold production is from a few huge pit mines in Nevada that are mining mostly gold.

Chronos’ mention of Rutherford’s experiment reminded me of the fact that it’s quite common for gold to be used in certain kinds of experiments. The usual ones I hear about involve attaching gold nanoparticles to DNA. Google >>gold DNA experiment<< to get links to a bunch of them.

I’m not 100% sure why they usually use gold instead of some other element. I think it may be that gold shows up on electron microscopes better than others.

Note that they use such small amounts of gold in these experiments that the price of gold is not a factor in the cost of the experiment. There’s probably lots of other chemicals they use that cost more than the gold.

QUOTE=Chronos;13048968]It’s my understanding that most gold mined nowadays actually comes from copper mines. It’s the much more common copper that keeps the mines profitable, and any gold they happen to come across is just a bonus. And copper, of course, is in fact valued pretty much entirely for its practical uses (nowadays, mostly its high conductivity).QUOTE]

I am going to look it up (again–I studied some metallurgy, and some incidental history) but I believe the mining of copper in antiquity actually was the same as the current experience. In other words, the copper was mined and gold just happened to be a “pretty” byproduct. Copper could be worked into utensils and tools, gold was definitely too soft, but also didn’t tarnish. Copper could be alloyed with other soft metals, to create harder ones (brass/bronze). Gold was going to be found, and it made pretty things so the value is essentially intrinsic in social history.

Gold was also alloyed with other metals, i.e, Electrum: (Wikipedia) “The same word was also used for the substance amber, probably because of the pale yellow color of certain varieties, and it is from the electrostatic properties of amber that the modern English words “electron” and “electricity” derive.”

Not sure about that. Its inertness means it doesn’t react with food or drink, so it makes ideal plates and goblets, which look a LOT better than earthenware or wood.

Definitely not. It is true that the biggest-producing gold mine in the world is a copper mine, but most gold comes from dedicated hard rock mines.

MrDibble - former gold mine geologist

I doubt it. Most gold mining in antiquity was either dedicated gold mining (Greece, Lydia, Egypt/Nubia) or gold/silver associations like the Kolah field in India. The kind of copper deposits that also yield gold were way beyond ancient metallurgical ability to separate out the gold.

These are usually lumped together (with platinum, rhodium, and ruthenium) as the “platinum group”. These metals are outstanding catalysts, used in the chemical industry and also for reducing pollution (think the catalytic converter in your car’s exhaust). That’s catalytic ability gives these metals much of their value, and it’s something that gold lacks.

I could see it being used in military applications as ordnance, since it has a lot of similar properties to lead. Even though our hypothetical society doesn’t value gold as expensive I could see gold bullets being marketed as ‘premium’ rounds to people with more money than brains.

Gold is used in satellites and probes for circuitry, I’m sure it’d be used a lot more if the cost were a lot less.

A small correction. The cite I grabbed showed gold figures for the last quarter, not for a full year. Assuming the demand for gold for industry is relatively steady, that would make the demand more like 2,000 tonnes per year.

Now this chartshows that world gold production increased pretty steadily from World War 2 to 1970, then rapidly increased from 1980-2000 before leveling off. However, production *per capita *actually peaked in about 1950 (when many countries still had limits on how much gold individuals could own.) Over the last 15 years or so, gold production is only increasing as fast as population growth.

I suspect that many uses would be found for gold were it cheaper. For example, gold leaf is a wonderful coating to prevent base metals from rusting. I remember when I was in school learning that it was considered a big boondoggle when the inside of the dome of the Philadelphia was coated with gold leaf sometime in the mid 19th century, but that the savings for never having to paint it had more than made of the cost over the century that ensued. And a little gold makes a lot of gold leaf. I have the impression that electrical contacts would be make of gold, on account of the corrosion resistance, if it were cheaper. So the price would fall to the point where some, but not all, of these uses started happening.

Gold has a pretty high thermal conductivity, I could see it being used in a variety of thermally conductive applications like radiators or PC heatsinks as well.