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History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…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 what the ground does not record. · Every surviving hoard is, by definition, one that was n…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…ld outside any single government's control. · There is a temptation to treat the monetary history of gold as a morality tale — a story about avarice, conquest and the human weakness for shiny things. It is a satisfying story and it is mostly wrong. The reason gold ended up in the…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…arts rock, which is why mining is an exercise in moving overburden rather than collecting treasure. · Is it true that all gold comes from exploding stars? Broadly, yes — but not from ordinary supernovae alone. Gold forms through rapid neutron capture, the r-process, which needs a…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…f gold and refining a kilogram of trust have become, in practice, the same job. · A short history of the industry's consolidation · Refining was, for most of the twentieth century, a fragmented trade: national mints, jewellery-district assayers and a scattering of independent ope…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…of miles from home. · This distinction sounds abstract until you notice how much monetary history has been organised around it. States that might plausibly go to war with each other, or that do not entirely trust each other's courts, have nonetheless been willing to store gold in…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…le and economically marginal. · Why tungsten, and why it broke the old test · For most of history, density was sufficient. Gold is extraordinarily dense at 19.32 grams per cubic centimetre, and nearly everything cheap enough to substitute — lead at 11.3, copper at 8.96, brass low…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold

…ced on compartments remain intact. · Why do countries store gold abroad? Practicality and history. London and New York are the two dealing centres for official gold, so metal held there can be sold, swapped or settled against without being shipped. Much foreign-held gold is a leg…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do

…y the real-rate link broke, one must look deep into the mechanics of the bond market, the history of monetary crises, and the shifting geography of global wealth. The story of gold in the mid-2020s is ultimately a story about the changing nature of money itself and the search for…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…keting says. · The chain of integrity · A Good Delivery bar's value rests on a documented history: refined by an accredited refiner, and held since then only in approved vaults, moved only by recognised carriers. That continuity is the guarantee. The bar itself carries stamps, bu…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…tion, and the pandemic turned it into one of the largest single uses of nanoscale gold in history. The newer work is therapeutic, and it is slower, because a diagnostic only has to be read while a therapeutic has to be tolerated. · Photothermal therapy — gold shells and rods tune…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…It does not mean the metal is physically different — refined gold carries no trace of its history. The value of the certification lies entirely in the paperwork behind it, which is genuinely harder to fake than it once was under current due diligence rules. · The gold market's su…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…fraction of the work and the state inherits the rest. · This is why the closure provision buried in the notes of an annual report is one of the more informative numbers in mining. It is a discounted estimate of a long-dated obligation, and the discount rate, the assumed treatment…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…more consequential for the long-run distribution of the world's monetary gold. · A short history of reserve gold since Bretton Woods · The custody arrangements that repatriation now unwinds were built in a specific historical moment and have simply outlasted it. In the decades a…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…roughly every twenty to thirty years in the UK system, so identical letters recur across history and must be read together with the shield style to date a piece correctly. Some historic assay offices have closed entirely — Glasgow's marks stopped being applied in the 1960s — lea…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…am per tonne or below, a decline of well over an order of magnitude across the industry's history, driven not by any single mine's decline but by the systematic exhaustion of higher-grade deposits and their replacement, in the production mix, by larger and lower-grade ones. · The…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars

…r its efficiency; in a collapsing one, physical is superior for its independence. Most of history happens somewhere in the middle. · Editorial note This piece describes market structure and is not investment advice. TheGoldMagazine does not recommend products, take positions or r…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…ing bottleneck or a substitution breakthrough — rather than demand-side shocks. · A brief history of gold in electronics · Gold's role in electronics is not a recent accommodation to modern engineering standards; it dates to the earliest days of the transistor. When semiconductor…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…ital provenance premium In the future, a bar of gold with a complete, blockchain-verified history may trade at a premium to 'anonymous' gold, even if the metal itself is identical. Provenance is becoming a new dimension of value in the bullion market. · Digital passports provide…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…ring, a decentralised savings system denominated in a metal that needs no bank, no credit history and no maturity date. It is inefficient by the standards of a modern portfolio — the making charge is a real cost with no offsetting return, and a bangle earns nothing while it sits…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…what · Stories are commissioned against a beat, not against a traffic target. Each desk — history, industry, markets, craft and mining — is owned by a named reporter whose background is published on their contributor page, and an editor who is accountable for what runs. We do not…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…publication is written for a general adult readership interested in commodities, monetary history and industry. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under sixteen. If you believe a child has sent us personal data, contact the e…

Mining · 5 August 2026

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

A gold mine is not a hole with gold in it. It is a spreadsheet with a hole attached — and the single number that decides which rock is ore and which rock is waste moves every time the price does. · Mo…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

Gold's working properties are so extreme they border on the absurd — one gram drawn into three kilometres of wire. Inside a trade where the tools have barely changed and the hands are irreplaceable. ·…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

Pure gold is too soft to hold a stone, too soft to hold an edge, and the wrong colour for half the world's taste. Almost everything you own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where t…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

A significant share of the world's gold is produced by people working with hand tools, informal finance and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisa…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is wh…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

There is no single gold price. There is a London settlement number, a New York futures curve, a Shanghai premium and a jeweller's counter in Dubai — and the distance between them is where the market l…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

For three decades official institutions were net sellers of bullion, and the policy consensus treated the metal as a museum piece. Then, quietly, the world's reserve managers reversed. The reasons are…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read