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.
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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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
(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.