Bitcoin Forum

not sure which forum to put it under so feel free to move it.

for the first time in history it is now possible to product 24k 99% pure gold using bacteria!!!!!!

the effective gold supply is not increased many times more.

what does this mean for gold bugs, what does it mean for people who say gold can't be "counterfeited", and what impact will this have on gold value being moved into bitcoins.

source:
http://gizmodo.com/5948739/researchers-discover-bacteria-that-can-produce-pure-gold

welcome to the new world! i've heard people say "people will never be able to produce gold"... well ...

It means next to nothing and even the scientist admits that.

As for what a man made precious metal or stone would do to a real market, I suppose diamonds are extremely cheap now since they can be man made, right LOL

diamonds are a scam market. i'm sure pure man made gold will drive market prices for "real gold" down in many ways.. maybe not tomorrow but eventually.

i consider this to be more like when China began cultivating pearls driving the price of pearls down 90% scenario. what's the point of using Gold as store of value when anyone and their mom can make it. and 80%+ of gold's value is store of value.

From the longer article at http://www.nature.com/news/gold-digging-bacterium-makes-precious-particles-1.12352 it sounds like the most they are hoping from here is to find a way to extract tiny amounts of pure gold from mining waste.

To me that sounds like it could end up being costlier than the conventional ways of finding gold for quite some time. If that is the case then this would have negligible effect on the price of gold — this method takes over once it becomes harder to mine gold conventionally.

It also sounds to me like it's got a good chance to being found completely impractical. Kind of like all those stories a decade ago about how people were going to sift the oceans to extract the trace amounts of gold and other precious materials. Only that was found to be vastly more effort than it was worth.

So it's interesting but I don't think any goldbugs should be dumping their hoards just yet!

I don't think this is the alchemy it insinuates. Apparently the bacteria feed on gold chloride (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold(I)_chloride) a compound of gold and chlorine. So it seems to me the bacteria act more as a gold filter than gold transformer, the gold being already there.


Yes, as I understand a big (or the biggest?) source of the world's gold is in the oceans, but it's not very cost effective to extract. Now there is a way to turn an inexpensive compound which is not gold into gold. However, it's also not cost effective at today's prices and you need a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator to do it ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold_synthesis_in_an_accelerator

...

Gold cannot be made by bacteria.  Sorry, bacteria do not add protons to a nucleus.  I am almost surprised to see such notions even being mentioned here, these "scientists", whatever they are doing (I did see one comment above about gold chloride being the feedstock for the process, uh, gold chloride).

Artificial diamonds will be a problem soon, though, for those looking to put money into diamonds.

Gold has a long bright future ahead of it.  Until they can extract gold from seawater (and there is not as much there as people think) and/or the energy requirements for changing some metals (lead?  mercury?) into gold become lowered by orders of magnitude, gold owners will be just fine.

:)

EDIT: as "acoindr" just wrote!

I thought that they were able to produce gold for 10+ years already, just that the price to produce is significantly more expensive than mining it.

Making gold is of trivial difficulty.

We have particle accelerators that have made much more difficult elements then gold.

The problem is it'll probably cost you 10K in electricity alone to make 1 atom of gold.

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madmadmax, I do not think even at FOFOA's $55,000 / oz that it would be profitable to make gold out of other elements. 

Even if you take FOFOA's newer prediction of +/- $100,000 / oz, or "twoshortplanks" number of $133,000 would make it profitable. Read from the master himself:

fofoa.blogspot.com (http://fofoa.blogspot.com)

Long & dense reading, tl;dr?  But serious gold people need to check out his stuff.  My suggestion?: start in October 2009.

Here's something to get you interested:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h6b2GYqoEBY/Uw28hhgjn5I/AAAAAAAAFxM/vfp3v9zvpC4/s400/Freegold_bellcurve.gif

Note that the peak probability is $55,000 in non-hyperinflated dollars.   :)

...

Maybe Butterfly Labs should advertise one for pre-order.

Amazingly BTC is heading in the same direction as mining diff keeps shooting higher.
Someday we will see huge mining farms using solar power, perhaps they will also create some gold.

Btw, according to wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals (at the bottom of the page)

The first gold synthesis (granted, it was a radioactive isotope) was in 1924.

I dunno when the first stable isotope synthesis was, but it was probably a long time ago and nothing new.

Extracting gold from seawater is also very real.

But none of those methods are cost effective.

It's kind of like buying the computing power to brute force a bitcoin private key. It's possible, but not worth it.

...

Bit_Happy

I read a few months ago about a company in ICELAND mining BTC using cheap geothermal energy there.  For cooling, they just have to open the roof and let all that cold air in...

I believe the same folks want to start a solar-powered plant (as you suggested) in Texas, see the second link below (both from Dec 2013):

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-iceland-pool-2013-12 (http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-iceland-pool-2013-12)

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/into-the-bitcoin-mines/ (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/into-the-bitcoin-mines/)

thread title is bogus to actual content,, so should be deleted

and gold is over rated plenty of other metals will do the job

it has been used as a form of wealth storage but total value

of gold doesn't even come close to property, bitcoins

convertibility also trumps gold and other forms of currency

transfers by such a degree its not even worth comparing,

property transfers would be considered to slow also

though are used by companies to trade large sumes of

wealth so its not really the same market either.

Until they find strands of bacteria that can perform nuclear fusion, gold bugs can sleep peacefully.

And, Brock Pierce can secure the VC. For marketing, invent a pseudonym like Wawaska Plutomi, having him pen a white paper...

guys please put facts into place.

no one can make gold. what this story about is detoxifying / cleaning the currently known dirty gold.

in other words, no big deal as the current 170k tonnes of gold will NOT become millions of tonnes in a few decades. it will stay around the same couple hundred thousand tonne amount, just that more % of that amount is now useful, rather than toxic.

i think the amount of gold produced by this bacteria is next to miniscule.

These bacteria collect gold particles, they not make them. The title is misleading.

We have been throwing gold away bit by bit in our bins. Electronic products contains high percentage of gold in them. When they are discarded, the gold is lost. There is a gold recycling plant in Japan where they mined back those tiny traces of gold:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bU-NwowzVE

The bacteria can do just that, but in slower and smaller scale. May be in the future, we can buy prepackaged DIY gold extraction kits using enhanced generations of these microbes.

and the odds are it will be radioactive.

People here seem to have a lack of knowledge about chemistry. The bacteria are just separating the Au atoms from the AuCl solution. IT is not MAKING Au atoms out of thin air

@OP: The title you have is misleading - Gold can no more be produced by bacteria than I can from my crap. Unless you are completing transmutation in a nuclear reactor or the heart of a star you cannot create new amounts of an element. At the moment the cost is so great that it isn't worth it so there will be little change to the end supply of gold meaning that it won't affect Bitcoin in any way.

We need someone to build a blockchain collider. Then we're in business.

Yes!

Also, this article is from 2012.    Mighty big impact this has had, eh?

This is what happens when you use a misleading topic title: two pages of posts saying to change the topic title. :)

dont be silly. bacteria eat gold chloride and shits out clean gold(in laymans terms).. its not making gold, purely cleaning existant gold. and its not radioactive.. its chloride.

This is just like diamonds. They can be produced by compressing carbon. But its not as sought after than the real deal. Gold price wont take a hit i dont think.

There is a big difference between lab diamonds and 'real' diamonds. Lab diamonds are so cheap because they are ugly peaces of matter. You can make jewelleries of them.

I think the lab gold will be aswell, cheap and only for industry because it isn't the real stuff.

LOL this cracks me up for cooling they leave the roof open

It's possible to make gold. It's just not worth it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation#History (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation#History)

This doesn't affect gold market or gold supply. These bacteria just convert gold from one form to another. To actually CREATE gold at least a nuclear reactor is needed. I never heard of bacteria capable of carrying out nuclear reactions.

Summary of this thread so far:

"The bacteria is extracting gold, and not creating it." -- repeat this 30 times.

Summary of the next 30 posts:

"The bacteria is extracting gold, and not creating it." -- repeat this 30 more times.

You can make stable gold isotopes as well.

Again -- it's just extremely expensive to do so.

Someone is clearly desperate to keep the gold price down...

LOL!  :D

I need only a battery to turn gold chloride into gold, there are galvanisation kits for children...

LENR synthetic gold is a thread (see my thread in speculation) but not this

in some countries kinder eggs (chocolate egg with a toy inside) are banned. So are you telling me while banning chocolate eggs for safety concerns, they are also allowing kids to play with car batteries and toxic waste?

(i mean this as a sarcastic joke, no rebuttle is required)

So much is wrong with this...

First, to address the lab made diamonds.  What you are saying was true at one time, but not today.  Early lab made diamonds were only used for industrial processes, as they were flawed and dull.  However, now it is possible to produce lab made diamonds that are absolutely flawless.  In fact, high end lab made diamonds tend to be higher quality than high end natural diamonds.  The only limit is size at the moment.  Lab made diamonds over a couple of karats are very difficult to produce, and thus cost too much to be worth it.  Still, smaller ones (still big in jewelry terms) are cheaper to buy than naturally occurring diamonds.  http://gemesis.com/

Second, you obviously do not understand what gold is in relation to a diamond. 

A diamond, along with graphite, fullerenes (nanotubes, buckyballs, nanobuds), lonsdaleite (hexagonal diamond...not the same as normal diamond...it can actually be almost 50% harder than traditional diamond), coal, and many other materials, are all allotropes of Carbon.  Carbon is an element.

Gold is also an element.  Creating a gold is not the same as creating a diamond.  It would be similar to creating carbon (though, creating gold would be much more difficult, and require much more energy).  We do not have the technology to create any element in large quantities (outside of what can be produced from nuclear fission), nor can any organism.

As far as we can tell, from physics, basically all of the gold in the universe was created by supermassive stars when they hit the last moment of their life, collapse inward on themselves, and explode in a supernova (or hypernova in some cases).  That is why gold, and most heavy elements, tend to be much more rare than lighter ones.  The creation of iron starts the chain reaction that leads to supernova, and thus iron, and anything heavier than it, is only produced for a moment.  Then the supernova shoots all of it out in every direction, dispersing it through the universe.

So, no, we don't produce gold in a lab, BUT IF WE DID, it would not be "low quality" gold.  It would just be gold.  Gold is gold is gold.  It is an element.  Of course, there are many radioactive isotopes of gold, but the most stable has a half life of something like half a year, so it quickly converts back to it's stable form.

 No need to worry... scientists also found bacteria which can mine bitcoins.

Oh yeah, I got distracted by the horrible butchering of physical, and chemical, laws here, so I didn't even post what I wanted to.  Gold is not going to be devalued by being created, because we are not going to produce gold in significant quantities at any point in the foreseeable future.

However, gold will likely be devalued by a huge influx of supply anyway.  This supply will come from asteroids.  Google, James Cameron, and many other billionaires\100+ millionaires, have been investing in companies that are developing the technology, and making plans, to capture, and mine, asteroids.

For example, 241 Germania is an asteroid that contains enough resources (in the form of various metals, minerals, water, etc.) that it could be worth $50-100 TRILLION if fully mined.  But, that is a very large asteroid, and very far away, so probably not one anyone will mess with anytime soon.  Instead, they would likely go for small asteroids that are very near us.  Many of those have $50-100 Billion worth of platinum and gold.

It depends on the country. In the US kids can have guns, in Germany no one can, so US kids are more mature than German adults.

The German kids are allowed to play with chemicals, as long as those are not dangerous to politicians. Here you go.

http://www.amazon.de/Dieters-Holzspielzeug-Experimente-Galvanisieren-Verkupfern/dp/B0045QTYAW

Hey, that's pretty cool!  I want to get that for my son, when he gets a bit older. 

alright, i'll confess i got too excited and could have picked a better topic name.

Here's the thing. The cost of mining an asteroid is going to be extremely expensive. So it's not like they found a way to get gold for $50 an oz. If it costs $1000 / oz to mine the gold, it'll still be profitable to mine it and sell it at current market prices, but it's not like they're going to be dumping it on the market super cheap.