Nope, it’s perfectly legal to possess gold bars today, although it was illegal from 1933 to 1975. The scary part is that the government can confiscate gold again anytime during a state of emergency because of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act.
I was there a couple of years ago, neat place. My memory is not 100%, but I’m almost positive that the floor of the vault was cut directly into the bedrock of Manhattan. This was both for practical reasons (as you said those trucks were heavy) and for security reasons.
Hey it’s not rare. Picture this: you buy some stock on ETrade for a comission (delivery charge). ETrade will then charge you if you don’t make any active trades (like a storage charge) and they will charge you if you want to get the stock certificate back (transfer fee).
Wow, what fun things they seem to have there! Maybe you could get a kilo of beryllium, and a lab balance, and put the large, low-sp. gr. Be on one side and the small, high sp.-gr. tungsten on the other. That’d be an interesting display.
For my birthday party/trivia contest two years ago, one of the questions was “if you had a sphere of solid gold whose radius was the distance from the earth to the sun, and you calculated its value in dollars, and rounded it off to the nearest power of 10, how many zeroes would be on the end of that number?”
Sadly, I’ve now forgotten the number. But it was quite large.
So that’s what my weight in gold would be…Hmmm… Yeah, I could live with that kind of cash…
Questions like this are precisely why there should be drinking allowed and even encouraged at your parties.
Does sound like one of your geekier parties, don’t it?
But what the heck.
Astronomical unit: 149 598 000 000m = 1.49598 * 10[sup]11[/sup]
Volume of a sphere: 4/3 pi r[sup]3[/sup]
4/3 pi (1.49598 * 10[sup]11[/sup])[sup]3[/sup]
= 1.4 * 10[sup]34[/sup]
Density of gold = 19.3 g/cc = 193,000,000 g/m[sup]3[/sup] = 1.93 * 10[sup]8[/sup] g/m[sup]3[/sup]
Total mass of the sphere = 1.93 * 10[sup]8[/sup] g/m[sup]3[/sup] * 1.4 * 10[sup]34[/sup] m[sup]3[/sup]
= 2.7 * 10[sup]42[/sup] g
A recent price for gold is $13.44 USD/g, so the sphere’s value at that price is $3.63 * 10[sup]43[/sup]
As for how many zeroes come after the answer, that depends on how precise your math is. I’ve been rounding to beat the band and probably made a mistake along the way.
Im no metallurgist, but when I was a teenager I worked in a pump shop for oil rigs. We had tungsten carbide balls just like that, and they were technically “perfectly round” and hollow. They were used on the end of pipe’s somewhere within the oil pump to maintain suction, and we sent them back to be reforged into new “perfectly round” balls every once in a while. They ranged in size from marbles to half of a bowling ball, and I recall the cost being 20-100 dollars for each one. They were extremely strong and, in my memory, equally bouncy as a same-sized rubber ball (if not moreso, I think they went higher but wouldn’t continue bouncing for as long).
One time our dog, Shasta, was making a jingling sound as she ran around. We took her to the vet and she had six of these in her stomach that she had eaten of the ground at the shop! 
Anyway, you can get one of these used for really cheap, if not free, by finding a local pump shop.
please disregard my spelling, punctuation, and grammar. that’s several glasses of wine talking 
Um, I’ve actually been to Max’s parties. They are, in fact, very geeky. And sadly, nonalcoholic. Everything goes better with vodka, I say.
You realize that would be a black hole, right? The value of a black hole is largely independent of its size. The only advantage to having a larger one is that you get a higher Eddington limit, but one that large would easily be large enough to meet the power needs of any Type III civilization (much less a less-than-Type I like us). So I would estimate the value of that sphere as being equal to the sum of the values of all of the power plants in the world and all of the uranium and fossil fuel reserves (since those represent all of the power we can use).
Huh. I happen to keep a 623g wedge of Tungsten on my desk, and I get similar surprised reactions. You definitely wouldn’t want to drop it on your foot. It’s got some sharp corners.
Those tungsten spheres definitely look cool.
The best place to buy gold (just holding the paper) is said to be the Perth MInt. Least red tape, etc.
I dunno, it was pretty cheap and easy to get ahold of in Mina Sulman, Bahrain
If you had been at my party and given that answer, I would have awarded you partial or complete credit.
(By the way, the way the question worked was that 8 or so teams were asked it simultaneously, and the ones who got closest to the right answer were awarded points. No one was expected it to get it dead on, with no reference materials, in 30 seconds.)