I take the gold. I like shiny gold and dollar bills would look stupid in my hoard.
What about… 500 kgs of Bitcoin?
One gram of X Dollar notes is worth X Dollar, as a Dollar note weighs one gram.
One gram of gold is somewhere close to 150 Dollar.
So with 100 Dollar or smaller notes I would take the gold, but there are also 500, 1000, 5000, and 10000 Dollar notes…
If you get a big pile of money you have to pay taxes on it immediately and then you only get interest on what is left over afterward. If get a big pile of gold you don’t pay taxes until you sell it, and in the meantime you benefit from any increase in value since then.
Selling shit is a nightmare, fuck the pound-to-value maths, just give me the money.
Yeah, but the volume of 500kg of monies is like 19× larger!!
Then again … 500kg of gold is just under 26 litres which would mean I can finally cast my favourite Bad Dragon product.
I’d probably take the cash since I don’t know how to turn gold bars into money. It’s never come up before!
Ez! Find your local CIA agent, exchange the gold for cocaine, go to you local financial district, exchange the cocaine for stocks, sell them immediately at double the price (that’s just how the market works when all are motivated by greed), pay capital gain taxes, cash out at a local bank that will charge you like 10% in fees (+10% for the local FBI agent that doesn’t want to believe), weight the money, it’s exactly 107 bald eagles.
It hasn’t come up for me either. What a weird coincidence!
Cash, the value be dammed. Im not trying to sell fucking gold. Im not a fucking merchant
Besides, you never know when the FBI might show up.
If the gold is in an accepted standard form, such as krugerrands, you just need to find a precious metals dealer. If it’s just a pile of gold, then there’s a lot of hassle. I imagine ingots of the sort national gold reserves hold would be somewhere in between.
Shifting a large quantity of gold may require a non-optional explanation of its provenance, with “I woke up and it was just there” or “a genie gave it to me after I did an online quiz” not being adequate, and an inadequate explanation resulting in its forfeiture if not more serious legal hassles. With a large pile of gold and no good explanation, you may be reduced to smurfing small pieces of it to different dealers, moving around a lot and avoiding the attention that such a pile would inevitably draw.
a large pile of gold
That depends as well. Gold in specimen and nugget form can be worth considerably more than its value by weight and there’s plenty out there chasing these. These are not hard to move at all.
But yeah, there can be difficulties trading it and it’s generally subject to taxes. Quite often you need to be licenced as at least a fossicker if you’re selling unrefined gold as a prospector.
That’s without the pain in the arse process of separating it from impurities.
People like Al Capone would have a few things to say about unverified sources of wealth in any form. Pretty sure if I show up at a car dealer with a briefcase of bills it’ll raise a few questions too.
And now you nerdsniped me into finding the value density of a dollar bill, which is roughly 1 gram, which makes a kilogram of dollars be worth some $1000 USD. Which still pales in comparison to the value of a kilogram of gold by at least a factor of 40-to-1
So, i know the post says “us dollars” but if it was hundred dollar bills, then the best value goes back to the paper, doesn’t it?
I had forgotten that the US dollars didn’t require being in 1 USD bills. Yeah, using 100 USD bills could make the value better than gold’s, as long as it sells below $100,000 USD per kilogram
…Never mind, the kilogram of gold hasn’t been below $100K since at least last year: apmex.com/gold-price/1-kg-gold…
I’d take either and be happy.
That runs Gabe’s yacht for about 6 months.
What, are you like a normal person or something?
(/s)Yes one or the other, or half of each I won’t complain.
Too metric. Can I get that weight in cheeseburgers please?
3500 in volume.
Ok. 500 kg of dollars, 500kg of gold or 500kg of cheeseburgers. Which do You choose?
Precooked weight if that matters.
Are those Troy kilograms? 🤔
Bills weigh 1g, and 1g of gold is >$100, so I’m going with gold.
I agree: you’d probably pawn the gold off to some billionaire for some nominal amount less than its face value. (Would the government would let you as a private citizen just sell them like $70 million in gold?) I’m assuming this is legal, in-the-clear, and it doesn’t matter if we assume it was created out of thin air.
I say “less than” because the buyers know you probably lack connections and just want it gone ASAP so you’re not robbed or worse. Still, whatever percentage hit you take can’t be anywhere near the 40% difference between the cash and the gold, and you’d probably dump it so quick that the investment opportunity cost wouldn’t matter.
So only go with bills if they’re in denominations >$100. I guess this would work better with euros.
But the cash is more liquid. Selling $70M worth of gold is a hassle and would invite unwanted attention. $50M in cash you can spend right away.
$50M in cash you can spend right away.
Maybe the bank won’t be too curious, but the IRS will definitely notice.
Just pay taxes on $50M. Then you’re left with around $25-35M depending on how you report it.
And that’s more than enough to live comfortably on interviewing l indefinitely
Cash in this day and age is a huge pain in the butt. Sure, you can get groceries and some tech. But buying a house or even a car or pay for services? Impossible to very inconvenient. Even just paying for everything in cash will be a problem if you ever get audited. You’d need to launder the money somehow and at that point you can also take the gold.
You’re saying I should open a car wash?
On the advice of counsel, I decline to answer that question.
Another critical difference:
If you got a million dollars in cash you were obliged to pay taxes upon receipt, and if you did not do so and you try to deposit it, you are going to get flagged for a tax audit and subject to criminal charges.
If you got a million dollars in GOLD you don’t pay taxes until you sell it. So you can sit on it for years and then sell it and deposit it and you only pay taxes at that moment and have not broken the law in doing so.
Money is income, Gold is just gold until you turn it into money.
Good point, but after a while someone would still want to know where the gold came from. Unless you sell it so slowly that it’d be barely useful to you.
Cash in this day and age is a huge pain in the butt.
The initial deposit would be tricky, but after that it’s pretty straightforward.
Around $140/gram currently for those curious
So then, however disgusting the thought, if they do make the trump $250 bill then that would be the only case where taking the cash is the better deal (putting ease of use for gold vs bills aside)
WWII killed the 500 bill (that was gold-backed at the time) so now ppl have to smuggle gold.
But steel is heavier than feathers…
Drop it on your foot to see…
What denomination are the bills and how much does each brick of gold weight? Cuz I mean, if the bills are high enough, like $5000s they might be worth more than the gold.
