[adhesive_wombat]

6.5 million plates at $500 each is 3 billion, not 35 million.

Just don't make them look gold (even if they're not solid gold), or they'll get looted and melted.

Though it would be fun if a murderous warlord ended up with a gotten crown made of the Wikipedia article for toilet paper orientation. [1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation

[areoform]

Oops! I did a rough calc in my head but forgot to add in the two zeros. But it's still fairly "cheap." 0.14 Ubers (14%), or 0.002 Pentagon Monetary Black Holes (0.2% of the F-35 program)

[wengo314]

i think it's a brave assumption that gold will forever be as valuable as now.

[sokoloff]

It’s not that it would need to be as valuable forever but rather the opposite: that it be forever not looted.

[hanniabu]

Gold is a really useful material

[GTP]

Indeed, it is a reasonable assumption that it will get more valuable over time, as it is a scarce resource.

[literalAardvark]

Gold is extremely common in the solar system.

In the next few hundred years it's pretty likely that gold price will be marginal, as asteroid miners looking for less useless materials such as nickel, cobalt and platinum mine an excess.

So no, unless for some hidden reason asteroid mining doesn't work out, which is pretty unlikely given how badly the developed world needs that material.

[code_duck]

Gold is quite useful as a corrosion-resistant conductor. If it wasn’t, cheaper metals would be used in its place in electronics.

[mixmastamyk]

This thread reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rip_Van_Winkle_Caper

[GTP]

But wouldn't use such miners make the extraction cost higher?