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Mining · 5 August 2026

Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit

…subset of resources under a stated price assumption, and they are restated every year. · All-in sustaining cost excludes the capital that built the mine, so a mine can be profitable on AISC and still never repay its investors. · How much gold is in a tonne of ore? At a typical m…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…ecause it is the only reagent that dissolves gold selectively at industrial scale and low cost; the risk lies in handling and storage, not in the chemistry being exotic. · Free cyanide degrades in sunlit water over weeks; the durable hazards at a closed mine are usually metals an…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…finance and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisanal and small-scale mining employs millions and is the largest source of anthropogenic mercury emissions. · Mercury amalgamation persists because it is cheap, fast and require…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…leave a vault. A retail coin adds refining, minting, insured transport, dealer inventory cost, VAT or sales tax where applicable, and a margin. On small denominations that stack can be a double-digit percentage of the metal value. · What is the EFP and why do traders watch it? T…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…duce electronics demand? Barely, in the short run. Gold is a rounding error in a device's cost structure, so a designer will not redesign a package to save two dollars. Sustained high prices do accelerate longer-term substitution programmes that were already underway for other re…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…fining or vault capacity tightens, the exchange-for-physical spread widens by roughly the cost of closing the gap. · Is stored gold insured? Professional vaults carry all-risks cover, but the terms matter more than the headline. Read for the per-location limit, whether cover appl…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone

…nomics are unforgiving. The gold in a single handset is worth a small fraction of what it costs to individually collect, transport, store and manually disassemble that handset. Value appears only at scale and only when the whole device is treated as a bundle of materials — copper…

Tomas Herrera · 13 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor

…re harder and cheaper but hold far less metal. · What are making charges? The fabrication cost a jeweller adds to the metal value: labour, wastage during working, design and margin. They typically run from single-digit percentages on plain machine-made chain to well over twenty p…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…e price another buyer will pay, and holding it carries storage, insurance and opportunity costs. · Currency effects: gold is quoted in dollars. A reader whose liabilities are in another currency bears an exchange-rate exposure that can dominate the metal's own move. · Mining equi…

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…by the demonstration that reserves can be immobilised. · Bringing gold home imposes real costs: vault construction, insurance, audit and lost liquidity. · The trend interacts with sustained official-sector buying, tightening the free float of deliverable metal. · Why did central…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…The layered approach · No dealer runs one test. Authentication is a sequence, ordered by cost and speed, in which each stage is designed to catch a different class of forgery. A bar that reaches the end of the sequence has been examined by methods with independent physical bases…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't

…nd deforms out of shape in daily wear. Alloying dramatically increases hardness at modest cost to purity. · Is white gold really gold? Yes — it is gold alloyed with white metals such as palladium or nickel to neutralise the yellow, and it is often rhodium-plated for a brighter fi…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…and platinum in reactors and accelerators. The yields are measured in micrograms and the cost per gram exceeds the market price by orders of magnitude. Transmutation is a demonstration of physics, not a supply source. · Will asteroid mining change the gold market? Not on any tim…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…from a large refinery are among the richest precious-metal feedstocks in existence. · The cost of the Wohlwill process is time and inventory. A cell cycle takes days, and during those days a substantial quantity of gold is locked up in solution and in partially dissolved anodes.…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…has been taught more or less unchanged ever since. · What the textbook underplays is the cost of the adjustment. 'Prices and wages fell' is an abstraction covering wage cuts, unemployment and industrial unrest borne by people with no say in monetary policy. The system's stabilit…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…being read by — and the material earns its price. Reproducibility is worth more than raw cost in a diagnostic supply chain. · Beyond the strip · Immunogold labelling has been standard in electron microscopy since the 1970s: attach gold particles of a defined size to an antibody,…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…as gone wrong; the finish has reached the end of its service life and needs redoing, at a cost that is modest but real and recurring. · Why Europe abandoned nickel Nickel is the cheapest and most effective bleaching agent for gold, and it is also one of the most common contact al…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…d each margin is defensible on its own terms — the counter carries fraud risk and holding cost, the consolidator carries transport and insurance, the refiner carries process losses. Stacked, they explain most of the gap between spot and what a seller is offered. · Do the arithmet…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…the national gold reserve entirely. The argument was not eccentric. Gold paid no coupon, cost money to store, sat on the balance sheet earning nothing, and had spent two decades falling. Sovereign bonds paid a yield, settled instantly, and were issued by governments that everyon…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…. Where your jurisdiction requires prior consent, we ask before setting it, and a refusal costs you nothing: every article on this site is readable in full with all optional storage declined. You can also clear or block storage entirely through your browser settings, though block…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…or any other instrument. · Our reporting frequently describes prices, spreads, production costs, reserve holdings, hedging structures and market mechanics. It does so to explain how the gold market functions, not to tell any individual reader what to do with their money. We do no…

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

A hallmark is one of the oldest consumer protection technologies in continuous use. It is also, on close inspection, a small masterpiece of institutional design — and it is being quietly eroded. · A h…

Yusuf Demir · 12 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly wha…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…ot treat continued scrolling as consent. We do not pre-tick boxes. We do not make refusal cost you the article, and we do not present a 'reject' option that is deliberately harder to find than 'accept'. Where a reader in a jurisdiction with an opt-out regime rather than an opt-in…