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Mining · 5 August 2026

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

…e to two grams per tonne — roughly a gold ring's worth of metal in a truckload of rock. · Cut-off grade is a price-dependent accounting decision, not a geological fact: a higher gold price literally converts waste into ore. · Strip ratio — waste tonnes moved per ore tonne — is of…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…actually cost to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground? The honest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices until the mine is already exhausted. · The industry's headline cost figure, all-in sustaini…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…rth a few dollars at prevailing prices. · Gold is specified where a connection must not degrade: it does not form an insulating oxide, so contact resistance stays stable for decades. · Substitution is real and mostly already happened — copper bonding wire displaced gold across hi…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…than gold ore? By concentration, frequently yes. Modern underground ore is often mined at grades measured in single-digit grams of gold per tonne, while sorted, high-grade circuit boards can run into the hundreds of grams per tonne. What e-waste lacks is a deposit: the material a…

Tomas Herrera · 21 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…he 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 and acidity, not the reagent itself. · Acid mine drainage generates when sulphide minerals meet air…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…idise on the shelf, will not leach reactive ions into a biological sample, and will not degrade under the light it is 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 labell…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…strial ore, and the binding constraint is the cost of retrieving mass from orbit, not the grade. · Start with a fact that sounds like a metaphor and is not: no process available to an ordinary star can make gold. Stellar fusion is profitable up to iron and then stops being profit…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…ite, must be re-refined and re-assayed before it can circulate as investment or jewellery-grade gold. · A small cluster of Swiss refineries has historically processed a majority of the world's mined gold, though Emirati and Asian refiners have grown sharply in market share over t…

Tomas Herrera · 20 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…hod still in daily use. The item is rubbed on a fine-grained stone to leave a streak, and graded acids are applied to the streak: an acid formulated for 14k will dissolve a 9k streak and leave an 18k one intact. It is cheap, fast, destructive only to a microscopic smear, and read…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…d: a streak of the item on a basalt stone, compared with streaks from known needles under graded acids. Cheap, quick, surface-limited, still in daily use. Density by displacement: catches tungsten poorly and hollow fill well; useful as a cross-check, never conclusive alone. Ultra…

Yusuf Demir · 20 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…nt where its identity is documented. · That is also the honest limitation of the consumer-grade verification market. A pocket conductivity tester is a useful sanity check, but it is not the reason the wholesale market has so little fraud in it. The wholesale market has little fra…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…onal electrolytic passes or zone refining at sharply rising cost, and the market for that grade is narrow — chiefly semiconductor bonding wire and scientific reference standards. · Is recycled gold treated any differently from newly mined gold once refined? Chemically, no — once…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…entral tension of monetary history appears. The issuer who guarantees the coin can also degrade it. Roman denarii lost silver content steadily through the third century; medieval European princes practised 'crying down' the coinage with such regularity that merchants kept paralle…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…loy — and the design is where the engineering lives. · Karat is a fraction, not a quality grade: 24 parts by mass, so 18k is 75.0% gold and 9k is 37.5%. · Pure gold measures roughly 25 HV on the Vickers scale — softer than a fingernail can dent — which is why it is alloyed before…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…g financial stress rather than during price rallies. · Good delivery is a passport, not a grade A London Good Delivery bar is 350 to 430 ounces, at least 995 fine, from an accredited refiner, with a serial number and assay stamp. The specification matters less for its purity than…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…lary exists to negotiate between workability and durability. · Karat is a fraction, not a grade · The karat system divides by twenty-four. Twenty-four karat is pure gold; eighteen karat is eighteen parts gold in twenty-four, or 75 per cent by mass, stamped 750 in the millesimal s…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…ecorded is a day in which soil layers can be disturbed, associated organic material can degrade beyond dating, and the spatial relationships that turn a pile of gold into a historical argument can be lost for good. The single most consequential variable in whether a hoard becomes…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…entirely and uses a material available in any hardware market. · It also demands a higher-grade concentrate than panning typically produces, which means it must be paired with improved gravity separation to work. As a package the two are strong; as an isolated substitution it dis…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…d for the better part of a century. What the audit gap produces instead is a durable, low-grade public suspicion that periodically flares into exactly the kind of domestic political pressure that drove Germany's repatriation, whether or not any underlying problem exists. · What c…

Ingrid Sørensen · 21 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…new deposit takes a decade or more from discovery to first pour, and an operating mine's grade is set by geology, not by ambition. The variable that actually flexes in the short run is recycling. When the price rises sharply, old jewellery comes out of drawers and into refinerie…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…e sending funds. · 3. How to read our numbers · Prices, spreads, all-in sustaining costs, grades, reserve tonnages and central bank holdings quoted in our articles are accurate to the best of our knowledge as at the date of publication printed on the page. Markets move; official…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…automated means beyond what is permitted by our robots directives, or in a manner that degrades service for other readers. · Use our text, photography, charts or data to train, fine-tune or ground a machine learning model, or to build a derivative dataset, without a separate wri…

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

For half a century it was rational to store your gold in someone else's basement. Then the calculus of counterparty risk changed, and reserve managers started chartering aircraft. · Overseas custody w…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

Most of the world's gold exposure is a contract, not a metal. Futures, unallocated accounts and exchange-traded funds each promise gold in a different way — and the differences only become visible whe…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

Half the world's gold is worn, not stored. In India and China that distinction barely exists — and the buying behaviour it produces is the most reliably contrarian force in the entire market. · Jewell…

Yusuf Demir · 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 · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

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