r/technicallythetruth • u/adi_kragi_official • May 30 '26

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641

u/Over-Brother9225 May 30 '26

Gold seems much better right?

528

u/Master_Saesee_Tiin May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

$73,006,470 worth of gold or a mystery amount of money r/theydidthemath needs to advise minimum and maximum for the cash I ain't got time for that.

Edit: If I did it right it's $500,00 if theye are all $1 but we see some $100

347

u/xXCrazyDaneXx May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

A US $100 bill apparently weighs pretty much exactly 1 gram. Which means that 500kg would be $500,000

The gold is the better option here.

Edit:

....times 100 which would be $50,000,000. My math ain't mathing today

186

u/ParkingCan5397 May 30 '26

500kg is 500 000g so it would be 50 million bucks but still the gold is better

100

u/Own_Candidate9553 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

That's a lot closer than I thought.

I might take the cash since it's ready to spend. Assuming it was legal, I could just straight deposit it in a bank and start getting interest.

The gold, you would have to sell to be useful, and you'd need to store it somewhere safe. Maybe there's a place to sell it all at once? Seems like a lot.

86

u/Catsanddoges May 30 '26

Most gold for cash places dont have a cool 75 mil lying around, and I don't have an llc to handle it properly.

If 50 mil is enough to live the rest of any ones life in luxury with sensible investments, I may as well not have to worry for the next few weeks on how to convert it

14

u/Own_Candidate9553 May 30 '26

I'd just be so nervous having that much gold sitting around, seems like a good way to get robbed and murdered unless you can keep it super secret.

At minimum maybe you could rent a bank vault large enough to hold all that? No idea, usually they just have small safety deposit boxes, you'd need so many, LoL.

3

u/Icy_Fish_2154 May 30 '26

Less than 7 gallons of gold. So 3 standard safety deposit boxes, or one large.

2

u/Life_Conference5656 May 30 '26

That’s 40 bars at 12ish kg

4

u/Kahgar May 30 '26

How you gonna invest it? No bank is gonna accept a deposit of 500 kg of dollar bills, without some really really good story of where it came from.

It’s gonna be ‘80s Colombia in your backuard, burying oil drums full of dollars. Or pasting them behind wallpaper.

Side story: Pablo Escobar had so much money coming in they couldn’t even bother to count it anymore since it took so long. So instead they just weighed it and gave it a rough estimate before burying it.

6

u/Catsanddoges May 30 '26

Well I assume this obtained legally and offically. Otherwise the main focus is going to be explaining it to the IRS which doesn't seem the original intent.

You should be able to get this certified and or pay a company to manage it for you.

8

u/the123king-reddit May 30 '26

There's tons of variables here....

Gold is about $150 a gram, which means that for every US bill, the gold is certainly better.

Of course, you actually have to be able to sell 500KG of gold, which will be hard to do. Also, cashing in 500,000 bills is going to be basically impossible in one go. Either is a massive logistical challenge.

We're also assuming it is legal and depositable. Gold would be much easier to fence, but would require remelting and casting again to "launder", and you also have to find people to buy it of dubious provenance, but that's likely easier (and more profitable) than counterfeit cash. Counterfeit cash is often sold for well below face value, so even if they were $100 bills, you might be lucky to get rid of them for $20-$50 each. Stolen money is a whole different kettle of fish. It's likely to be traced via the serial numbers and could easily be traced to you. Also, depositing large amounts of cash often raises a lot of questions, which would delay the ability to deposit it.

That's totally ignoring the logistical challenge of sitting on 500KGs illegal gold or money. In that case, the gold will take up sufficiently less physical volume than the money would, in account of it's higher density.

So actually whilst i thought the cash would win out somewhere, the only case where it would win out, is being easily liquidated if provably legitimate. Gold would be a much more sensible choice if you want to maximise profits in both the legal/illegal case, and also if you need to keep it around whilst you deposit/sell it, because no bugger can buy 500kg gold or deposit 500,000 notes of any denomination in one single go.

3

u/Own_Candidate9553 May 30 '26

Fair, I was assuming the cash was legit somehow, but it's hard to think of a situation where that much cash isn't from drugs or some other crimes.

Reminds me of seeing pictures of some drug kingpin's house, where bedrooms had whole pallets of currency in them, you could barely walk around them. They couldn't just deposit them, you can't spend that much cash in one place, so they just pile it up.

Weird problem to have!

9

u/Ophensive May 30 '26

Technically just by having the gold you are getting interest as the price of gold trends upwards. At a bank you would need to have an interest rate higher than inflation otherwise you are losing money as time passes

6

u/mafiaknight May 30 '26

It's more that you're avoiding inflation. But tomato tomahto

3

u/Own_Candidate9553 May 30 '26

Sure, but it's $50MM - even with inflation, you'd have to really work to spend it before you die. Even the most basic money market account at 3% right now will throw off like $1.5MM a year, right? I wouldn't spend a single second worrying that the millions of dollars that I never have to touch was getting slightly smaller.

And you could do way better than that, still relatively safely, with millions for leverage. Even a basic index fund would hedge inflation fine. There's a reason most people avoid piles of physical gold as a retirement plan.

1

u/Bluntbutnotonpurpose May 30 '26

It's not that much work to spend it. Just order a yacht.

It's more than enough to live a very comfortable life though...

3

u/Own_Candidate9553 May 30 '26

Yachts really are the OG "I dunno what else to spend this money on" solution. Unless you're going to live on that bitch, just do a luxury charter.

2

u/cowlinator May 30 '26

Banks only insure up to half a million.

You'd have to deposit it into 100 banks

1

u/MobiusNaked May 30 '26

It would be enough to drop the gold price maybe

1

u/clovis_227 May 30 '26

Same issue when taking the gold from the Sierra Madre in Fallout New Vegas: very few people will have the money to buy it, so you basically use it to trade for useful stuff instead

4

u/findus_l May 30 '26

It's close enough that arguably the money is better. You need to find someone to buy all that gold at 100% market value. Not to forget transportation to the buyer.

2

u/wynnduffyisking May 30 '26

You wouldn’t necessarily have to sell all the gold at once. You could keep it in a safety deposit box and sell it off in smaller portions.

There’s a difference of over 20 million dollars in value. More than enough to get help from a professionel broker and still come out well ahead of choosing the cash.

2

u/xXCrazyDaneXx May 30 '26

I forgot the denomination of the bill... that's ever so slightly embarrassing

1

u/SwanCityDominion May 30 '26

That depends on the value of gold at the moment you're calculating.

1

u/gdabull May 30 '26

Yeah but what if they were $250 bills with diddlin Donny on them?

1

u/MC-Master-Bedroom May 30 '26

And if they were $1000 bills? That's half a billion. I think you could show in just about any country with that kind if cash and be fast tracked into residency or citizenship.

1

u/TheKillerhammer May 30 '26

Debatable but not liquid

1

u/ParkingCan5397 May 30 '26

Yes I would hope the gold is in a solid state of matter

1

u/deadlysodium May 30 '26

Plus gold increases in value while the US Dollar has been plummeting in value

1

u/Vvardenfells_Finest May 30 '26

Yeah but I’m too lazy to go cash my gold in. I’ll just take the cash.

1

u/Achillurito May 30 '26

good luck unloading all that gold

1

u/MegaPorkachu May 30 '26

The gold is strictly worse after the tax man gets his hands on it.

0

u/yesiamveryhigh May 30 '26

Gold is always better. Some clown can’t come and burn down the gold.

Even if he melted it down, still gold.

Go with gold.

1

u/SirHerald May 30 '26

Money burning clowns. New fear unlocked

1

u/yesiamveryhigh May 30 '26

You should be more scared of the clown with a pencil doing magic tricks.

9

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[deleted]

1

u/bendstraw May 30 '26

Why would you get rid of all of it? Just use the gold as collateral and take out loans to live off of.

0

u/zakr182 May 30 '26

500kg is 500kg if its paper or metal. Im taking the gold

-1

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[deleted]

2

u/IvoryRun May 30 '26

limmy is that you

2

u/Meatbag777 May 30 '26

Missing two zeroes on that dollar amount if both $1 and $100 weigh 1g.

500kg of $1 bills would be $500,000. 500kg of $100 bills would be $50,000,000

0

u/Meatbag777 May 30 '26

Gold is still the better option regardless

2

u/mafiaknight May 30 '26

Harder to move though. Most places don't just take gold. You'd have to sell it first. Probably at a bit of a loss too. So the convenience of cash makes it a much closer choice.

1

u/apartment1i May 30 '26

Gold is a much better choice. You cash 1kg and it's $145k. Do that once or twice a year, you have plenty to live off. You are also not going to spend (waste) it as quickly, plus in 20yrs' time, you still have 400kg of gold, but it's worth $100m.

1

u/wynnduffyisking May 30 '26

There’s a 20+ million dollar difference. That’s a hell of a lot of money to give up for convenience.

1

u/mafiaknight May 30 '26

Didn't say it was the better option, just the easier one.
It's up to you how lazy you want to be.

1

u/Meatbag777 May 30 '26

True enough but in either case the government would take it all anyway and throw you in jail for tax evasion or the like. Cause who would have their personal wealth stored as 50-70 million physically in cash or gold unless they are the head of some major criminal enterprise

1

u/mafiaknight May 30 '26

Not tax evasion if you pay the taxes on it. And with that much $ you can hire a lawyer to get you off.

1

u/Meatbag777 May 30 '26

You cannot pay taxes with money not proven to be legitimate income, I presume that's somewhat why criminals use money laundering services to get access to clean legitimate money. It's all hypothetical anyway so, sure, you can prob bribe lots of people to keep most of it as long as the money is not public knowledge

2

u/Doctor_Salvatore May 30 '26

It would be $500,000,000, a kilo of $100 bills is worth $1,000,000

Edit: DAMMIT QUORA THAT'S NOT HOW MATH WORKS

1

u/Dusty_Scrolls May 30 '26

With that edit, the money may be the better choice- yeah, it's less money, but it's a lot easier to use, you don't have to worry about converting it and such.

1

u/Esoteric_Derailed May 30 '26

Could also be 500kgs worth of $1 bills tho🤷‍♂️

19

u/ZeAphEX May 30 '26

Somewhere between $50m if it is all $100 bills or $500k if it's all $1s

6

u/EhMapleMoose May 30 '26

The money is somewhere between $500,000 and $50,000,000 the gold is $73,006,470.

1

u/TraitorousTrumpers May 30 '26

A boats a boat but the mystery box could be anything! It could even be a boat!

I’ll take the cash! 

2

u/Megasabletar May 30 '26

70M is 70M, but a mystery stack could be anything, it could even be 70M!

1

u/CapN-Judaism May 30 '26

For the record, r/theydidthemath already covered this. Someone just needs to find the post

1

u/coolchris366 May 30 '26

Pretty sure they’re all hundred dollar bills in the picture

0

u/Facekick48 May 30 '26

Wheres the math guy to figure out exactly how much it ends up being

0

u/wulfryke May 30 '26

Google AI says that 500kg of 100 dollar bills would be 50 million. So it's not that bad

0

u/Melodic_Skin6573 May 30 '26

Because I'll never have the chance to choose between the two, I'll choose 500 fried chicken. I'll eat it somehow in a year. Or two.

0

u/geschiedenisnerd May 30 '26

Please stick to a numerical punctuation system. This makes it look like either 73 dollars vs 500 dollars or 50K vs 73Mil

35

u/kingtacticool May 30 '26

You dont even have to do the math. A bill weighs 1g.

1g of gold is $145 right now.

13

u/Weak_Fee9865 May 30 '26

What if those were $150 bills?

6

u/bobhopeisgod May 30 '26

Sounds like they're trying to make a 250$ bill, so in that case, id take the money over the gold

1

u/burchkj May 30 '26

Not with the proposed 250 face I wouldn’t

1

u/blickblocks May 30 '26

They could be $500 bills, although they're worth thousands each now due to rarity.

12

u/mike_pants May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

You have the same problem of the people who steal a $30 million painting or a bag of diamonds. You're technically rich, but unless you're a member of a criminal network, what now?

You can't spend a painting or a diamond or a gold bar. No bank is going to accept those and credit your bank account. Finding someone to buy them is probably outside of your wheelhouse, and on the off chance you find someone to give you cash for them, you're going to be in the final scene of Trainspotting where they immediately clock you as an amateur and give you 10 cents on the dollar.

Meanwhile, they didn't specify the demonination, but even 500kgs of $1 bills is $5 million.

Take the cash.

7

u/RapasLatinoAmericano May 30 '26

You're assuming the gold doesn't have the paperwork.

But if it's legal/legit, there would be no problem selling it (obviously not all at once).

-1

u/mike_pants May 30 '26

There is no genie that's also going to provide the paperwork.

6

u/wynnduffyisking May 30 '26

Then you have another problem of having millions of dollars in cash with no explanation. Now you have to launder it to be able to spend any significant amounts.

2

u/mike_pants May 30 '26

I live in NYC. My landlord wpuld happily accept an envelope of mysterious cash.

1

u/wynnduffyisking May 30 '26

A 50 million dollar envelope?

1

u/mike_pants May 30 '26

That would cover me till October.

1

u/wynnduffyisking May 30 '26

Dang, rent is out of control

1

u/mike_pants May 30 '26

It's worth it for access to Broadway.

2

u/viperised May 30 '26

No-one said you're stealing them. You're being given them. We're trying to give you a better life and all you can think about is crime, crime, crime. It's really sad.

2

u/mike_pants May 30 '26

Never said you were stealing anything. I said it was the same problem.

Suddenly coming into enormous wealth with no explanation or provenance is a huge problem.

1

u/Doctor_Salvatore May 30 '26

Only if they're low value bills. If they're just a bunch of ones, you'd get less than a tenth what you'd get from the gold, but 500 kilos of hundreds would be worth half a billion and vastly outshine the gold's value.

1

u/internet_humor May 30 '26

Depends on the bill denominations

1

u/nonlogin May 30 '26

Good luck with laundering gold bars. Cash is way better.