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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Only semi-fixed supplies.

If gold gets too valuable relative to labour, more mountains in South America will be pulled down to extract the gold.

Think of the way hundreds of millions of dollars have been put into bitcoin mining ASICS just because someone saw a return could be pulled out if thin air... Gold mining is pulling a return out of rock when the economic conditions are right.

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Yup. There are plenty of dormant mines here in Colorado because "there is 100 million dollars worth of gold in that mine but it will cost 200 million dollars to extract it". Once the first number changes enough in relation to the second, those mines will start right back up.

A high profile example is the Donlin project in Alaska. They've been spending decades on de-risking and logistics, and once the gold becomes valuable enough to extract it's likely to be one of the largest mines in the world.

https://www.novagold.com/properties/donlin_gold/overview/

I seem to recall that when the Spanish conquered Central and (most of) South America, and found and mined huge amounts of gold and silver, it increased the supply of gold by 20%.

Sure, mining may increase the supply of gold... a very small amount compared to the existing supply. It's not going to move the needle in terms of supply vs. demand, though.

Your analogy is slightly wrong, as more ASICs won't increase the Bitcoin supply.

(Technically it will a little until the network difficulty adjusts.)

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