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All about Gold
Gold is the most coveted of all precious metals, and also the purest. Its yellow color has been fascinating for thousands of years: it has its fever and millions of men have rushed to look for it, sinking into madness or amassing fortunes.
However, its rarity alone is not enough to explain the crazy desire of which it is the object. Certainly, specialists agree that since the ancient times when the first man found the first nugget, barely 166,000 tonnes of gold have been extracted from the world’s subsoil. It is enough to materialize this mass, a priori incommensurable, by a simple cube with each edge measuring at most 20 meters to understand the extent to which the quantity of ore currently in circulation ( or stored in the various federal reserves and banks around the world) is derisory.
The geographical distribution of gold deposits has gradually sculpted the face of the world. Man has been extracting gold for more than 7 millennia, and if this ore has always been at the origin of the spirit of conquest of many civilizations, it has taken on a truly geopolitical interest only in the last few centuries, when it became the object, with many other resources, of the covetousness of the great colonial empires.
The geographical areas containing the most gold have therefore also been the most coveted, and it must be recognized that its distribution has not been equitable. Currently, Australia and South Africa alone hold more than a quarter of the world’s mineral reserves, followed by Russia, which is believed to hold 10%, then Chile, the United States of America, Indonesia, whose subsoil would contain approximately 5 to 6%.
Gold Trading Explained
Gold mining constitutes the beginnings of the monetary system which today governs all our commercial exchanges. Because high-value metals first began to be exchanged before being minted with the effigy of kings and taking on the appearance that we know them: currency.
Gold not only shapes the landscapes of the regions of the world in which it is present, but also the history of men. Its major geopolitical stake, which depends on its rarity and the value attributed to it by states, therefore makes it a coveted metal, a source of conflicts, battles and population movements. Human history is full of these decisive events which can be directly attributed to gold, and which contributed to constructing the map of the world as we know it today.
Thus, in the centuries immediately following its discovery, the entire American continent, from North to South, was coveted by the largest colonial empires. The Aztec civilization certainly owes its decline to it, and the American West its conquest and its rise. The search for the unobtainable Eldorado, or the fabulous Cities of Gold, as well as the Gold Rush are part of these events, where myth met human History and which led hundreds of thousands of men to engage in a frantic and often vain quest.