After taking James Bond hostage, Auric Goldfinger does what all Bond villains do when in a position of power — he spills the beans. ‘Mr Bond, all my life I have been in love,’ he tells him. ‘I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness… I ask you, is there any other substance that so rewards its owner?’
You don’t have to be a criminal mastermind to understand what Goldfinger means. The hunger for gold is ancient and shows no signs of abating. The metal’s enduring value is dictated above all by scarcity: it makes up just one 500,000,000th of the Earth’s crust. We could fit all the gold ever mined into a cube with sides of only 22 metres.
Gold was created billions of years ago by nuclear explosions inside or between stars.
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