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You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the fa
by ludston 4y ago
You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the famous quote "Eureka I found it!"
- cowtools 4y agoInteresting point. I don't have any comment, but it looks like this guy disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31933490
- datadata 4y agoFor daily transactions at the current gold price, it would be extremely hard to do this sort of measurement that way with any precision without very specialized equipment. A gram of gold (around $60) is a reasonable daily transaction size and has a volume of 0.05ml. In order to distinguish metals of similar densities, you'd have to be able to measure just a fraction of that volume accurately. Maybe there is some clever system to scale this down, but wasn't obvious to me.
- ludston 4y agoWell one historic way of doing this, was instead of trading directly in minute quantities of gold, people would store larger amounts of gold in a bank and trade contracts that represent certain fractions of what is stored. This was called "currency".