If somehow gold did not have the ancient association with wealth and value that it does (along with silver), and it was valued solely as a heavy metal like iridium or palladium, what would it probably be worth?
Since gold is easily worked, does not tarnish or rust, and is scarce, I imagine it would be worth just about as much as it is now.
As Squish points out, gold has a lot of attributes that make it valuable. As a conductive metal that doesn’t tarnish, it makes an ideal coating for electrical contacts that will need a lot less cleaning than a metal that corrodes or tarnishes. IIRC, there is even an office building here Toronto that uses 2,500 ounces of gold leaf as insulation (by baking it into the windows).
Since well over half of all gold is used in jewely, I’d say that the price would be quite a bit lower. However, the cost of extraction is high so it would still be fairly expensive.
I can’t give a meaningful answer to what the price would be, but if you want a guess I’d say perhaps 25% less than current prices.
I think the OP wants to remove the “scarcity” issue which is much of what gives gold its value.
But I think it would be slightly more valuable than silver for the other reasons. It would probably replace copper as conductors in everything. Though it isn’t the best conductor (silver gets this award), not tarnishing and being easily worked make this metal great.
I dunno. It sounds like he wants to remove the “artificial value,” and just look at the scarcity+usefulness.
How much of the scarcity is artificial? If governments didn’t get it into their heads that gold was like “standard money”, wouldn’t those piles of ingots be out in the community rather than sealed in vaults? On the other hand, if mankind wasn’t gold-greedy, the gold might still be buried underground and therefore scarce.
The big question might be, as alluded to earlier, whether “artificial” means removing the “jewelry” value, which is distinct from value as “money”. If not, a comparison might be platinum, which is extensively worn for decoration, and a precious metal, but not used as a monetary standard.
Though technically more common than gold in terms of parts-per-billion in the Earth’s crust, a difficult extraction process is partially responsible for platinum being worth quite a bit more than gold. Market pressures also play a large part with all precious metals. Like rsa, I will hazard a guess that demand for continued use in jewelry would mean that the prices wouldn’t drop much. I’ve also heard that the current low gold prices are getting very close to extraction costs.
Though, of course, gold prices have been creeping back up again lately, having bottomed out at about $255 a little over a year ago - currently abour $320. Probably largely attributable to uncertain economic times and general anxiety, which brings out the “gold bugs”.
The cost of commodities, including metals, has been going down steadily for decades as demand goes up.
The demand is what drives the technology to get the stuff. The technology and the economies of scale drive the price down.
If gold weren’t “artificially” scarce due to jewelry use, demand would be much lower, and as a perverse effect, may be more expensive.
Isn’t pure gold rather soft and flexible?
The price of gold is always just a bit above extraction costs since when the price rises mines that weren’t profitable can reopen.
Gold is a good conductor of electricity, but it is also soft. Alloys are harder, of course, but in general alloying lowers conductivity substantially. I don’t know if electrum (an alloy of gold and silver) is a very good conductor. Slightly off-topic, back in the 50s someone make very high quality relays that had either gold or silver contacts. They cost the same (a lot), but you were advised to use gold if the typical voltage was under 1.5 volts and silver if it was typically over 1 volt. (I guess either one if you were switching between 1 and 1.5 volts.) It was never explained why.
Yup. You really can bite down on a pure gold nugget and leave an impression.
The unit? (is this a gram?) and what type? 14k?
I’m no expert…
Troy ounces.
Quoth erislover:
Copper is actually a slightly better conductor than gold. The usefullness of gold as a conductor comes from the fact that it doesn’t tarnish or corrode, but this is mostly important for contacts, rather than long wires. With silver or gold wires, you’d also need something to add structural strength (some sort of plastic sheathing, perhaps), since they’re both softer than copper.
Of course, if we’re going to de-precify gold, we might as well do the same for silver, which (as you noted) is the best conductor among the metals, at room temperature. It’s also much lighter in weight than gold, which is a definite advantage in many applications.
The weight of gold, by the way, might lend it to other uses. It’s not the heaviest of metals, but it’s heavier than lead, so might see applications in things like fishing weights and bullets.
Gold is much less toxic than lead, too, which would be a definite advantage in bullets.
…aaah, but SILVER bullets have their own unique advantages.
Them damn werewolves!!! Hey, where’s my garlic underpants? I just put them ov… aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgggh!!!
Hey, Chronos - We just checked the periodic table and Au is at 79 and Pb is 82. Does this not make Pb heavier than Au? I thought the higher up you climb, the heavier the doodad.
PS: Sorry, chronos, that looked like a challenge. I really thought that the numbers determined the weight. I’m just looking for clarification.
stockton, the table means that, molecule for molecule, lead would be heavier. Perhaps the way the molecules are arranged allows for silver to, by default, have a lower density?