Monetary gold (the thing that controls the price of gold, ie, the precious metals spot prices) and precious jewelry is about half of the usage of today's newly

Monetary gold (the thing that controls the price of gold, ie, the precious metals spot prices) and precious jewelry is about half of the usage of today's newly mined gold, industrial and electronics taking up the other half. Over human history, about 165 thousand metric tons (or 182 thousand short tons, or about 5.3 billion troy ounces) of gold have been mined, or at a spot price of $1200, almost $6.4 trillion dollars of gold. 33 thousand metric tons of it is currently held by banks and individuals as monetary gold. Gold mining produces 2.5 to 3 thousand tons of gold each year. But get this: if we melted the entire planet down, there would be single digit or possibly low double digit quintillions of metric tons of gold. In other words, we have mined less than a trillionth of the gold. What keeps gold prices so far up is it costs about $1000 per ounce to mine, although this is dropping due to larger and larger mining machines and more automated processes that involve less people. Outside of electronics, gold has no real world usage. Monetary gold and jewelry are largely artifacts of the past, imo. Once we eliminate those, the continued fast pace of growth of industrial and electronic consumption will be handled for quite some time, and also drop the price of gold significantly.