= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jobe_smith comments on What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility? - 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 (85)
Gold mining. Adding marginal ounces of gold to world supply adds very little utility because gold can be pretty much endlessly reused and there is plenty of it around that has already been mined. Central banks of fiat currencies sit on many years supply for no particularly good reason. Meanwhile, the industry consumes $billions annually of real resources (like fossil fuels and capital equipment) and produce pollution and environmental damage.
Isn't the underlying problem gold hoarding, then, and not gold mining? (If gold were as cheap as copper, what would we do with it that we don't do already?)
Are you asking what uses would humanity intensify and employ even more gold for than we already do now, or what entirely new uses (which are currently uneconomical or have not been discovered) we would employ gold for? Because at least for the former, there's a variety of uses for gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Medicine (and scroll down for further uses).
Both are good ways to answer.
A lot, actually. Gold is very ductile and completely impervious to corrosion, just to mention the first two characteristics that came to mind.
And a really good electrical conductor. It's already used extensively in the integrated circuit industry, although they don't really use very much by weight...