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>The physical volume of gold has very little to do with how expensive it is to keep safe. I'm having my doubts about that. If I can fit all my life's savings

>The physical volume of gold has very little to do with how expensive it is to keep safe. I'm having my doubts about that. If I can fit all my life's savings in my pocket, I would very much prefer to do that with savings in one pocket and gat in the other (yes I know gold doesn't fit that for everyone, but lets imagine the physical volume is smaller since you said it doesn't matter). Fight to the death against violent intrusion upon your person. That doesn't incur me any material cost. If I die I won't be needing it anyway. would 100000% prefer that to sitting in the bank where some bonehead at a three letter agency can freeze or seize it at will, maybe the help of a rubber stamping judge. Or worse yet some unelected governors at the fed just choose to inflate it away. I guess there is some argument to be made it's cheaper to keep something safe if it is either very small or very large. Small enough and you can more effectively hide it or keep it on your person. Large enough and someone will need a semi, a few men, and a big forklift or crane to steal it. Houses come to mind as something worth a lot but unpractical to steal in the conventional sense of just taking off with it. I can't imagine the amount of costs lost in places like Argentina by people trying to find a way to keep their fiat held in a safe way.

kragen 4y ago
You may be interested in the 02006 Ramallo bank robbery, in which an acquaintance of mine lost her life savings: https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist Houses are worth a lot, but they are not worth a lot per kilogram. Consider a house consisting of four 4m×4m rooms and a floor, with 200-mm-thick floor and 3-m-tall walls made of 2.4g/cc concrete, plus a cheap sheet-metal roof. This house might cost US$100k, but its 144 m² of walls and 64 m² of floor contain 41.6 m³ of concrete. (We can disregard the weight of the roof as insignificant.) So it weighs 99.8 tonnes and only costs US$1.002/kg, 4.7 orders of magnitude less than gold. Different construction techniques can modify this somewhat but by less than an order of magnitude. I think the lesson you should draw here is not "a large thing such as a house is impractical to steal in the conventional sense of just taking off with it" but rather "a thing worth only US$1/kg is impractical to steal in the conventional sense of just taking off with it, unless it floats". It's also unusual for people to steal pieces of a junk car chassis, for example, even though all the equipment you need is an angle grinder or a portable oxy rig. If a thing is impractical for a thief to carry away, it is also impractical for the owner to carry it away themself, or to conceal their possession of it from thieves.
- notch656a 4y ago
  >You may be interested in the 02006 Ramallo bank robbery, in which an acquaintance of mine lost her life savings: https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist Great read, thank you.

kragen 4y ago

You may be interested in the 02006 Ramallo bank robbery, in which an acquaintance of mine lost her life savings: https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist Houses are worth a lot, but they are not worth a lot per kilogram. Consider a house consisting of four 4m×4m rooms and a floor, with 200-mm-thick floor and 3-m-tall walls made of 2.4g/cc concrete, plus a cheap sheet-metal roof. This house might cost US$100k, but its 144 m² of walls and 64 m² of floor contain 41.6 m³ of concrete. (We can disregard the weight of the roof as insignificant.) So it weighs 99.8 tonnes and only costs US$1.002/kg, 4.7 orders of magnitude less than gold. Different construction techniques can modify this somewhat but by less than an order of magnitude. I think the lesson you should draw here is not "a large thing such as a house is impractical to steal in the conventional sense of just taking off with it" but rather "a thing worth only US$1/kg is impractical to steal in the conventional sense of just taking off with it, unless it floats". It's also unusual for people to steal pieces of a junk car chassis, for example, even though all the equipment you need is an angle grinder or a portable oxy rig. If a thing is impractical for a thief to carry away, it is also impractical for the owner to carry it away themself, or to conceal their possession of it from thieves.

notch656a 4y ago
>You may be interested in the 02006 Ramallo bank robbery, in which an acquaintance of mine lost her life savings: https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-buenos-aires-bank-heist Great read, thank you.