Patito

You can do that going back a few decades, but not centuries.

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.

To get a useful answer you would need information from organisations like: The Vatican, The Templars, very wealthy families... and there may be organisations outside the WEst that you have never heard of that hold gold. The mainstream solution has been to ignore what is not easily counted.

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.

Is this guy a nutcase too... for talking about Gold reserves of 2mn or 2.5mn MT's?

 

Think about all the Chinese Tea, Chinese Silks, Chinese porcelain, and spices too that showed up in Europe and America. What did the West use to pay for it? It wasn't all opium. There must have been a steady flow of Gold and Silver : bars and coin to China.

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...