The alluring and shiny qualities of gold, its relative scarcity, and the difficulty of extraction have all contributed to the perception of gold as a valuable product. But why is gold so precious? It turns out that the reason gold is so valuable is precisely because it is so uninteresting from a chemical point of view. Gold is also more valuable than silver because it is available in much smaller quantities. It is estimated that all the gold that has been mined throughout history and has not yet been mined can fit in just over three Olympic swimming pools, totaling 244,000 metric tons.
This is in comparison to silver, which has approximately 1.74 million metric tons that have been mined to date, not including what hasn't yet been mined.Gold has been used as a currency in many countries for centuries and remains a symbol of wealth and power. This is partly why the precious metal has always been in high demand and, for many people, it is the most popular precious metal due to its many benefits. Predictions of the price of gold for the next 5 years suggest that one of those benefits could be the growth of wealth.Today's miners can use a chemical method to separate the metal from its less valuable environment. Scientists believe that gold arrived on Earth after the collision of two neutron stars in space forged gold atoms in meteorites, which crashed into Earth about 3.9 billion years ago.
Gold density has been very important for mining in the past, especially during the California Gold Rush, as it could easily be seen in the bottom of a frying pan. Pure gold is a little too soft, not to mention it's expensive, so gold alloys are normally used for things like crowns, fillings, bridges and caps.The use of cyanide for this process was first developed in the late 19th century in Scotland and, since the 1970s, it has been the main gold mining method used in commercial gold production. Gold does not rust, does not tarnish and has no stains because gold reacts with almost nothing. It is quite safe to say that ever since the human race became aware of the concept of possession, gold has been sought and, therefore, determining the purity of gold has been extremely important.
As gold mining continues to slow down and the costs associated with mining increase to meet the mining challenge, gold could become even more expensive.If you put together every earring, every golden ruler, the tiny traces of gold on each computer chip, every pre-Columbian statuette, every wedding ring and cast it down, it is estimated that you would be left with a single cube of 20 meters or more or less. In reality, however, this is highly unlikely and many times the amount of gold a truck contains can end up producing little or no gold.So what exactly made gold so valuable and expensive? Surprisingly, it's not so much about its properties but about what other elements don't have. To determine whether or not they had found a piece of real gold, prospectors used a piece of real gold and threw it into the water along with another possible piece of gold and compared how long it took both to sink.These terms usually appear in the annual reports of gold mining companies and provide their best estimate of the total amount of gold that can be extracted. Even today, after abandoning the gold standard, if you went anywhere in the world you could probably exchange gold for goods and services.
