4 ms·
The thing I wonder about is this - what if there's a city on Mars that has a 10 ton block of gold. What's the price of gold on Earth? Is it the same as now?
by hackeraccount 3y ago
The thing I wonder about is this - what if there's a city on Mars that has a 10 ton block of gold.
What's the price of gold on Earth? Is it the same as now? What if I could email someone on Mars and buy 50oz of gold? Could I sell it to someone here? What if it's cost prohibitive to move all of the gold to Earth? Or any of the gold to Earth? How refined does the Martian gold have to be before someone on Mars can say the own it?
The answers to all of those are clear (or at least only marginally unclear) for materials that are intrinsically valuable but for the "store of vaule" as opposed to industrial use of something like gold it gets weird for me.
I guess the answer to all of those questions is - whatever someone will pay.
- huthuthike 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones In Micronesia there was a practice of carving massive "coins" out of stone. These "Rai stones" were often too large to move. Yet individuals could "own" them and they were traded often for things of great value. I believe I even read an account of one that had sunk in a shipwreck, but the owners went on to trade it even though it was at the bottom of the sea. Just cause a physical item cannot be possessed physically doesn't mean it is valueless. However, for gold specifically, part of what makes it valuable is that it has some manufacturing uses and people like making jewelry out of it. There is no doubt a much larger supply of gold throughout the universe than on earth and it has no effect on the price here. So I think while you can buy and sell gold on another planet (provided people can widely agree on it's transfer of ownership), that would be a completely separate market from the terrestrial gold market.