Pecunia non olet. Gold has no smell. If the bars are genuinely made of gold, and of the advertised weight and purity, they are not counterfeit. The quantity

Pecunia non olet. Gold has no smell. If the bars are genuinely made of gold, and of the advertised weight and purity, they are not counterfeit. The quantity of metal is the only thing that matters. If anything, the problem is the attempt to shoehorn provenance information into what is clearly a money commodity, and one that loses its individual identity every time it gets re-melted. Just let it go, man. You can't track all the money on the planet all the time. If this is a problem, the only solution is to demonetize gold and replace it with a trackable, traceable substitute. And good luck with that. You'd be replacing trust in chemistry and physics with trust in the money-tracers.