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lennier writes "Has Magic the Gathering Online Exchange tapped all its mana? MtGox, the first and best known Bitcoin exchange, has abruptly shut down, and CEO Mark Karpeles has resigned from the Bitcoin Foundation after rumors of ongoing theft related to the transaction malleability issue reported several weeks ago. According to the latest news reports, Bitcoin has hit a three-month low of $465 USD per coin."
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MtGox Shuts Down, CEO Resigns From BTC Foundation
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I'm gliding over a NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP near ATLANTA, Georgia!!
(Score: 5, Informative) by adolf on Tuesday February 25 2014, @08:39PM
Neither of these points are entirely true.
Of the metals that are useful for making wire, gold is between annealed copper and aluminum in terms of electrical conductivity. To say that gold is a lousy conductor compared to copper is to also say that everything except for silver is a lousy conductor compared to copper.
And while it's useful that it resists corrosion very well indeed, another thing that makes it very useful as a contact material is that it is very soft. This enables much closer mating of contact surfaces and tends to promote very low-resistance contacts, since there aren't as many of those pesky insulative air molecules in the way.
Of all of the metals and alloys we have, it is unique in these properties -- and I'm only talking about electrical contacts.
And though its monetary value is chiefly driven by the fact that it looks nice (50% of gold production goes into jewelry, 40% to investment, and 10% to industry, or so sayeth Wikipedia), the mere fact that it is considered pretty does not in any way diminish its industrial utility, or the intrinsic value of that utility.
Put differently: Just because gold is both pretty and perhaps overpriced does not somehow make it intrinsically valueless. FFS, even a singular toothpick has non-zero intrinsic value (I keep toothpicks around more to use as tools and materials, than for picking my teeth -- and they have a non-zero cost to produce).
If gold were cheap enough, I'd have (very heavy) solid gold dinner plates and salad bowls. And it would still have intrinsic value.
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 1) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 25 2014, @09:08PM
I never said gold was valueless, only that it's not nearly as intrinsically valuable as many make it out to be. Yes, it's very handy for electrical contacts. Care to name any other uses? I suppose it'd be an OK wire material, but we already have copper for that, and copper is better. Perhaps for some specialized applications where you want wire that can be bent more, as gold is more malleable, but again there aren't many applications like this where copper isn't already sufficient.
For electrical contacts, you don't exactly need much gold, since it's used as a plating, and gold is so malleable it can be plated absurdly thinly.
And yes, if it were cheaper, you could feasibly make more stuff out of it, but that doesn't make it intrinsically valuable, it just means it could be used for that, even though there's other materials that are just as good if not much better (in terms of durability, energy usage to make, etc.). Given how hard gold is to find and its rarity in nature (driving up energy costs to produce), porcelain or even stainless steel are far superior materials for dinner plates.
If it weren't for jewelry and investment/currency, gold would not be worth very much (though not completely worthless; it'd probably still be more valuable than tin or lead, for instance). It's only highly "valuable" because it's shiny and pretty and people like to make baubles out of it.
(Score: 0) by adolf on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:40AM
Gosh, it's feeling more and more like /. by the second:
That -was- you, wasn't it? *sigh*
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 1) by HiThere on Wednesday February 26 2014, @03:10AM
Gold is a lousy material for making dinner plates out of. It conducts heat too well. You want something that doesn't conduct heat for a dinner plate. It's also too soft, so it would rapidly accumulate nicks, bends, and bulges.
Please note, when gold has been used for dinner plates in the past it has been for the purpose of conspicuous display of wealth and power. This doesn't work of gold is cheap.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by adolf on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:44AM
Your argument seems to be that having cheap solid-gold dinner plates would be impractical.
My counter-argument is much simpler: It's my house, and I can be as impractical as I want to be.
If the price of gold were to suddenly drop to a few dollars a pound before morning, I can assure you that I will be in the process of building a casting forge by the afternoon.
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 1) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 26 2014, @02:40PM
That attitude is exactly why gold is expensive now: because it's shiny and pretty, rather than for its metallurgical properties. If everyone wants to make their dinner plates out of gold, then that drives up the prices, leading to it being ultra-expensive just like now. So this doesn't make sense in the context of this discussion, which is: what would it be like if no one cared about gold's shininess, and only cared about its metallurgical properties?
(Score: 1) by adolf on Thursday February 27 2014, @07:35AM
You're only considering demand, but the price of a commodity such as gold is also based on supply.
If supply were to increase such that there were plenty of gold to go around (just as there is currently plenty of iron or aluminum), people could still have their shiny and pretty things, and I can have gold dinner plates.
But to answer your own hypothetical question: If people, tomorrow, began to universally consider gold ugly, and there were no investments in it (no hoarding of a relatively scarce, but useful commodity? yeah, right), the price would drop...some.
It's expensive to find gold, and it will remain expensive to find gold. If it became unprofitable to mine, people would stop mining it. This would increases scarcity, which I think would support a rather higher market price than might seem obvious at first.
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 27 2014, @03:11PM
Why would anyone hoard gold if everyone thought it was ugly? Just because it's rare? Uranium is rare too, but no one hoards that as in "investment". There's dozens of other elements that are rather rare, but no one bothers hoarding those as "investments".
If everyone thought it was ugly all of a sudden, the price would drop massively. It'd only be valuable for its industrial uses, based on its physical properties, and that's it. Lead isn't particularly attractive (quite dull actually), so it's only used for things where its properties make it attractive (and with the health problems, we've found alternatives for some of those). Of course lead is also not rare, but it also has a lot more uses than gold, even now in this age of RoHS: battery acid, solder for more critical applications (resists tin whisker growth), I'm sure there's lots more. Gold would probably still be a little more valuable just because of its rarity, but not much, due to its lack of useful applications (the gold-plated dinner plate from before would be out; people don't want ugly plates). It doesn't take much gold mass to plate connector contacts.
(Score: 1) by monster on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:58AM
Yep, much better to use silver. It has antibacterial properties [wikipedia.org].
Just for the record, there were gold dishes in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, because it was quite abundant. When the first european arrived, natives couldn't understand their fixation with gold, since it was so readily available.
(Score: 1) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 26 2014, @02:37PM
Gold-plated steel (or stainless steel) plates might work, except for the heat-conduction bit. (Though I don't know if gold can be plated onto SS; let's assume it can.) This would eliminate the problem about nicks, bends, and bulges, since SS is quite study, while giving the plate the property of not affecting the food's taste (professional tasters use gold spoons, remember, because gold doesn't have any taste unlike other metals).
I do wonder how important the heat-conduction property is though. My understanding is that in India, for instance, SS is commonly used for dinnerware because it's cheap there (India manufactures a LOT of SS stuff), and they favor its ruggedness (SS plates don't shatter when you drop them). They think we're a little weird for using porcelain because it's so easy to chip or break.