Patito

Well, a random sample would of course include gold from museums, churches, banks, coins, teeth, ... so it's not really limited to a certain period. The beauty of statistical weaponery is that you don't have to count everything to get reasonable numbers. So partially I'd agree with the mainstream here. In science only the observable universe counts (museum, church, jewelery, ...)... everything else simply doesn't belong into a sample for a scientific estimate.

Hm. Coudn't the question about the total amount of gold be answerend by a mathematician pulling out the the bag of tricks of statistics?!? E.g. like people estimated the number of words Shakespeare had in his spoken vocabulary. 1) Observe random independent samples of gold out there. 2) Observe how much of it was mined in a location with a well known output. 3) Conclude it's some kind Poisson-Distributed (or whatever...). 4) -> Numbers Practically it might not be so easy to collect the random samples :-), but I'd say there's surely a way to sqeeze out some pretty good numbers I'd have more confidence in than anything from random lunatics (or anything official...).

Hi, I'm new here, I've been following the discussions for quite a while now, and sometimes I have a question I'd like to ask. Plus I'd like to stay in touch with old friends...