= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jadagul comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (501)
That's a good point. I also add that Wikipedia says that:
But still, if just a few wizards stole appreciable fractions of the Muggle gold vaults, they would be individually very rich. The same 1000 tons of gold would be a (ETA fixed calculation) 200 million Galleon fortune if owned by one wizard. Therefore, the question is how much gold is concentrated in one place (already mined) and available for stealing.
Wikipedia provides a list of officially reported gold holdings by country. The top few are: US, 8133 tons; Germany, 3391 tons; IMF, 2814 tons; Italy, 2451 tons; France, 2435 tons.
But where is the gold physically kept? Well, Wikipedia says that Fort Knox holds 4578 tons of gold. In any case, a wizard could Apparate to people, ask them where most of the gold is (Legilimency/Veritaserum/Imperius), Memory-Charm to erase the few minutes of the encounter, and Apparate away. If the person doesn't know where the gold is, they can tell you who does know. Start with someone like a bank CEO, unlikely to have magical protection (unlike heads of state), and work your way on - in a day or two you'll find the gold.
How do we know this hasn't actually happened? The gold in the bank vaults may not be actually there. But the wizarding economy doesn't have a known history of occasional sudden billionaires. Lucius probably never even heard about fortunes of more than a few million Galleons.
There's another big pile of gold, about 7,000 tonnes, in the New York Fed--that's actually where a lot of foreign countries keep a large fraction of their gold supply. It's open to tourists and you can walk in and look at the big stacks of gold bars. It does have fairly impressive security, but that security could plausibly be defeated by a reasonably competent wizard.
More to the point, whatever security Muggle vaults had 100 or 200 years ago definitely wouldn't have stood up to wizards. (Their powers wane by the year, while ours wax.) Since all the Muggle gold didn't vanish long ago, there must be a different explanation than Muggle vault security.
I think that a lot of the Hogwarts Founders and Merlin stuff was actually setting things up so stuff like this wouldn't happen.
Possibly, but why couldn't it have happened prior? There was plenty of gold around in the ancient world, and not enough of it got stolen. Nor is enough sitting in the wizarding economy.
The statute of secrecy also didn't exist back then.
What are the relevant implications of that? I'm not coming up with any.
Muggle society could hire wizards to punish thieves.
Wizards would know more muggles personally.
Maybe there really were fortunes made in those days, and it was covered up on our end. (Small fortunes, because muggles hadn't had time to mine as much gold?)