How Much Gold Is In The Entire World?
No one knows exactly how much gold exists in the entire world because of private ownership, but there are some pretty good guesses as to how much there is. Gold has been around since ancient times, giving it an indefinite lifespan as well as an indefinite measure. Plus, if you consider all of the gold that could exist out in the world that has not yet been mined, we really may never know how much gold is in the entire world.
According to the encyclopedia and other resources, there are a reported 50 million troy ounces of gold produced each year worldwide. If you add that up, that turns out to be a tremendous amount of gold, considering that it dates back so far in history. With modern mining methods it is likely we are producing a peak amount of gold during this time in history.
For many years, the production of gold was not recorded. Especially in ancient civilizations, finding out an exact measurement of how much gold was produced and used can be a very complicated process, if not impossible. Even if we assume that the amount of gold produced was around 50 million ounces per year for the past 200 years, there is no way to judge the accuracy of that assumption for anything past 200 years ago. However, if you use that estimation, that makes more than 10 billion ounces of gold that have been produced over the past two centuries.
If you took the amount of gold produced annually, and attempted to put it into an actual physical space, it would turn out to be a cube that is about 14 feet on each side. This is based on the gravity of gold being 19.3, which means there are 19.3 kilograms of gold per liter. Given that there are 32.15 ounces in a kilogram, you multiply that by the number of kilograms per liter, which gives you the estimate of a gold cube measuring 2,744 cubic feet produced each year in the world. This cube weighs in at more than 3 million pounds, and is worth upwards of $40 billion, depending on the specific price of gold in the current markets, which fluctuates on a fairly regular basis.
And if you took all 10 billion ounces of gold mined in the world in the last 200 years and brought it all together it would fill a cube that measured 82 feet on all its sides. This would make a cube of gold about one third the size of the Washington Monument.
Even though you can make all of these estimations and assumptions, it still is very hard to determine exactly how much gold exists in the entire world. Without knowing how much has been produced in ancient history, or how much each country holds, there simply may never be an exact estimate of how much gold is in the entire world. However, using documentation from today’s gold production and the estimation of how much it was used in past years, we can get a pretty good idea that there are mass quantities of gold for every kind of use imaginable.
Yes, there is a lot of gold in the world, but due to high demand in industry, jewelry making, coinage and the collectible nature of this precious metal, it will always be a good investment vehicle.
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