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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

I'm a complete novice at such things, so pardon the dumb question.

Is gallium significantly cheaper than platinum?

Gallium is produced from the waste streams of Aluminum production (primarily at least), and a whole lot of it just isn't extracted and left as waste.

Platinum is quite a lot more valuable than gold, found in similar deposits, and rather rare. (you could say it is also produced from gold production waste streams and be mostly correct, it used to just be discarded long ago, but now it is very highly valued)

I'm not familiar with how pricing precious metals works, but it looks like, as of this moment, gold is priced about 2x more than platinum[1]! Presumably these prices have quite a bit of variability, and gold and platinum switch places sometimes? (Although your main point about gallium being _way_ cheaper than gold/platinum holds for sure.)

[1] https://www.suissegold.eu/en/charts/platinum

Another neat point for gallium is that it's fairly non-toxic, easy to get, and a ton of fun to play with. You can melt it with your hands!

Ah, hm, updated knowledge. From about 1999 to 2008 platinum traded at about twice the price of gold. They were roughly equal until 2015 then gold started trading about double the price of platinum.

Platinum has quite a few industrial uses, gold is getting more attention as a store of value lately, probably lots of other more complex market forces going on as well.

Yes, ludicrously so, platinum is one of the most expensive metals.

Edit: For actual values (per gram), Gallium ~0.50 USD, Platinum ~33.22 USD

yes like 60-70times cheaper

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