3 ms·
The stamp lends a level of surety about the product both in origin and quality. If I'm buying a bar and I know it comes from refinery X with a long reputation I
by rtkwe 7y ago
The stamp lends a level of surety about the product both in origin and quality. If I'm buying a bar and I know it comes from refinery X with a long reputation I don't have to worry as much about the bar being gold/silver/platinum at the stated quality. It's not perfect but with other documentation about the source that matches what the bar is telling me it provides a level of certainty. I worked in my family's pawn shop as a kid and the rare chance to buy a bar (I only ever bought a silver bar so it wasn't as big a deal) was always stressful because there's no good way to check the quality of the whole bar (this was before the advent of the handheld devices but even with those you have to worry about it being say lead with a thick layer of gold around it).
- namibj 7y agoActually it's not _that_ difficult to do transmission X-Ray diffraction measurements. Or for gold, just measuring density. You do need to do the latter to like 5 significant digits, but that's not hard per se.
- rtkwe 7y agoDensity isn't hard in a technical sense it's just a pain and you have to have the resources to do it. Namely a way to accurately measure the displacement which wasn't something we had. A majority of our gold testing was designed for jewelry and used a rough glass square and an acid blend for the different major carats of gold we would see. It worked by rubbing off a small part of the gold onto the glass then adding some acid and watching it's reaction, if it wasn't gold or was lower purity it would dissolve and disappear quickly. It was rudimentary but it worked well enough, there were some subtleties with exactly how it should react that you learned over time.