“Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…”

—  Neal Stephenson , book Reamde

Economics of gold farming, Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certa…" by Neal Stephenson?
Neal Stephenson photo
Neal Stephenson 167
American science fiction writer 1959

Related quotes

Bret Harte photo

“Later, when we were forced to accept the fact that finding gold was really the primary object of a gold-mining company, we still remained there”

Bret Harte (1836–1902) American author and poet

Captain Jim's Friend.

Neal Stephenson photo

“Gold is the corpse of value…”

Neal Stephenson book Cryptonomicon

Economics of gold farming, Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons
Source: Cryptonomicon
Context: Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…

Bill Haywood photo

“The mine owners "did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!"”

Bill Haywood (1869–1928) Labor organizer

Haywood, William D. The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood. New York: International Publishers, 1929, p. 171.

Ray Dalio photo

“When central banks print a lot of money to relieve a crisis, buy stocks, gold, and commodities because their value will rise and the value of paper money will fall.”

Ray Dalio (1949) American businessman

" Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8" (at 6m43s), Principles by Ray Dalio, 2 March 2022.

Alan Greenspan photo

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

Gold and Economic Freedom http://www.constitution.org/mon/greenspan_gold.htm 1966
1950–60s

Friedrich Hayek photo

“If the world as a whole returned to the gold standard there would be such fluctuations in the value of gold that it would very soon prove impractical.
Today an international gold standard could only mean that a few countries would maintain a real gold standard. The other countries would hang on to the system through a gold exchange standard — where the currency isn't really redeemable in gold but the government attempts to keep a fixed rate between its currency and gold.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Interview in Silver & Gold Report (1980)

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham photo

“Kisses are but like sands of gold and silver, found upon the ground which are not worth much themselves but as they promise a mine near too be dig'd.”

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) English statesman and poet

Source: Commonplace book, P. 195

Anne Brontë photo

“At your time of life, it's love that rules the roast: at mine, it's solid, serviceable gold.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XX : Persistence; Mr. Maxwell to Helen

Vitruvius photo

“Copious springs are found where there are mines of gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, and the like, but they are very harmful.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII, Chapter III, Sec. 5

Karen Lord photo

“Getting information out of them was like extracting gold from ore—a lot of labour and time, and why bother to do it when you know there’s a store just around the corner?”

Karen Lord (1968) Barbadian novelist and sociologist of religion

Source: Redemption in Indigo (2010), Chapter 23 “One Door Closes...” (p. 174)

Related topics