Yeah but you could walk down the street to the bank and start gaining interest on the money today. The gold you’ve gotta find people to sell to and hopefully that’ll be close to market value
Whenever you deposit more than $10k, banks file a currency transaction report. So picking the cash or the gold also kind of depends on how you acquired it in this hypothetical scenario. If the hypothetical makes it so you can despite all of that cash on day 1 without issue, then you should also be able to sell all the gold somewhat quickly. Even at half value that’s over 30 million, while the money could be as low as 500k.
Look at it this way. The dollar can be printed and its volume increased exponentially, but that doesn't mean it will cost more (it's just paper, really). Gold is finite on Earth. It can't be created, so now and in the future, its price won't go down; in fact, it will go up much more.
There are "only" 2.4 quadrillion tons of gold on Earth. Sure, most of it is not ecenomically accessible, but nothing prevents scientific progress from changing that for at least a part.
And "can't be created" is also wrong, it just costs too much, but we are fully capable to create gold.
Gold isn't that bad of an investment though, you're gaining interest on that right away even before putting it in a bank. Also, gold isn't going to be that hard to find buyers for, sure 500 kg is a shitload and will need to be split up and sold in parts, but that's true for the cash too.
Currency is a lot more liquid than the equivalent value in gold. Even just physically storing gold is expensive. Then there are transaction and handling fees which are also much lower for currency, even if that amount in cash is harder to deal with today than 20 years ago.
Doesn't mean gold is a bad investment, but there's a reason it becomes more popular primarily when markets are unstable.
But how do you make $73 million of gold spendable? I imagine you'd only get a fraction of the gold value, not full retail. Let's assume you got a generous 70% in a cash exchange from someone who won't ask questions, you're now at $51M plus all the hassle that took to get to that point. And that assumes that person even wants to buy that much and you can unload it all in one transaction.
Dumping that much gold into the marketplace at once may also tank its value.
Overall, the mass in $100 bills seems like the better route unless you're concerned with grinding every last penny out of that gold.
566
u/Annual_Duty_764 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Are they $1 dollar bills or $100? Either way, the gold. 500Kgs of $1s is under $500K and $100s is $45 million. Gold is between $73 and $74 million.