A good portion of that has been hoarded since biblical times, and has not been in actual "circulation" ever.

▲ defrost 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What percentage is "A good portion" ?

  Gold mining dates back to ancient civilisations.

  Our best estimates suggest that around 216,265 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history.

  Interestingly, about two-thirds of this gold has been extracted since 1950.

  This massive increase in production has been due to advancements in mining technology and the discovery of new gold deposits.

* https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold

200 Years of Global Gold Production, by Country - https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/200-years-of-global-go...

  Between 1500 and 1650, the Spanish imported 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver from the New World ...

* https://www.quora.com/How-much-gold-did-the-Spaniards-take-f...

What's your estimate for the tonnage of gold "hoarded since biblical times" ?

▲

fuzzfactor an hour ago | parent [-]

>What's your estimate

Good question, I would say your guess is as good as mine, but looks like you have recent statistics !

Thanks for the information, it does look like realistic figures about as accurate as you can get.

I just accept that as much as possible gold has always been hoarded much more strongly than silver amounts having the same values at the time.

Enough to regard silver as a medium of exchange compared to gold as a store of value.

Gold is so tightly hoarded that I expect that there is more than one accumulation established centuries ago, that originally consisted entirely of ancient gold which is comingled with material from the 20th century and maybe newer by now.

It's also possible that before any human value was established for gold in prehistoric times, there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit without need to do very much "mining" at all.

Of course cave men had no formal education but they were sapiens just like us and had plenty of progressive generations over thousands of years to shrewdly recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable. At least some of them anyway :)

And they sure had orders of magnitude more time to pursue economic interests and accumulate wealth before recorded history than there has been since then, no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet !

Edit: Not my downvote! Where did that come from? Corrective upvote now placed.

	▲	defrost an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> I would say your guess is as good as mine Spolier: I did a few decades of exploration geophysics, some time working on the production circuit of the SuperPit, and part of a team that sold a global minerals intelligence database to Standard & Poor 16 or so years ago. > there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit And yet the total amount of known gold in all of history is less than a quarter of a single megaton .. suggesting mega tonnes of gold from from before the Roman Rio Tinto mining days has lasted more than two thousand years stacked up as nuggets in many many many caves and structures without being found. That's an interesting hypothesis. > Of course cave men had no formal education Interestingly nor did my father (born 1935) and he's still walking about > recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable. Can you expand upon the value of megatons of gold to cavemen ? > no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet ! Oh, you know, gravitometers, ground penetrating radar, seismic surveys, etc. are all means of exploring for things not yet on any ledger. > Edit: Not my downvote! I don't fuss much about those, not on my comments, and I see no reason to downvote yours - just ride it out, they mostly even out over time.