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Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest time…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

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. ·…

Amara Okonjo · 16 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

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…y richer 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 m…

Tomas Herrera · 13 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 · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…bars trade without re-assay in the wholesale market. · Provenance documentation now determines a bar's marketability as much as its fineness. · What is a doré bar? A doré bar is the semi-pure alloy poured at a mine site, typically 70–90 per cent gold with silver and base-metal i…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…ties, yes: a tonne of scrap circuit boards contains far more gold than a tonne of typical mined ore. At household scale it is not economic and the informal chemical methods used to attempt it are genuinely dangerous. · Does a higher gold price reduce electronics demand? Barely, i…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…t all of the gold present when Earth formed sank into the core with the iron; the gold we mine arrived later, in a bombardment known as the late veneer. · Ore is not made by geology delivering gold to one place but by hot water dissolving trace gold from enormous volumes of rock…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…a quarter to a third of annual gold demand, and its volume responds to price faster than mine output can. · Scrap is priced off spot, adjusted for assayed fineness, then discounted for testing, refining, transport and each intermediary's margin. · High-street payouts commonly la…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 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

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

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

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…arked 750. The remaining quarter is alloying metal, usually copper and silver, which determines hardness and colour. · Why is pure gold rarely used in jewellery? At 24k gold is soft enough to be marked by a fingernail's pressure over time and deforms out of shape in daily wear. A…

Yusuf Demir · 11 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

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

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

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…gifts · Anyone writing for this publication discloses to the editor any holding in a gold miner, royalty company, refiner, exchange-traded product or dealer that could reasonably be affected by their reporting. Where a holding exists and the assignment proceeds, the interest is d…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…GoldMagazine is an independent editorial publication reporting on gold — its markets, its mines, its metallurgy and the people who work it. This Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data collected through this website, including every article page, the archive, and any…

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…dicators that a hoard was given rather than hidden. · Can you tell where ancient gold was mined? Only approximately. Trace-element profiles and lead isotope ratios can be compared with ore-body signatures, and the technique works best on objects made from a single, freshly refine…

Marguerite Adler · 16 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

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

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

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…