Bills weigh 1g, and 1g of gold is >$100, so I’m going with gold.
Yeah by my calc a 1kg of $100 bills is about 100K, but the kg of gold is roughly $140k-150K (I just checked and its $144K)
But then I’d have to sell the gold…
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.
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.
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.
Would it raise as many questions if you inexplicably receive a priceless painting as a gift from an anonymous benefactor and then sell it on the legitimate market?
You’re saying I should open a car wash?
On the advice of counsel, I decline to answer that question.
The point of laundering is to wash money acquired illegally. Meaning you still have to pay the taxes.
If the 500 KG of cash lands on your lap legally and you can somehow prove that, you can just declare it as income and pay the taxes. If it’s drug money or something then you’ll have to launder.
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.
“after a while someone would still want to know where the gold came from”, five minutes after the cash has been exchanged, you’ll be quickly forgotten about. You don’t live in a damn csi episode
I do, however, live in the real world. Where anyone giving you a decent price for your gold is subject to AML laws.
Cash is honestly easier for your average person to deal with. Either way you’re either going to pay a ton of taxes or you’re going to hide everything. Gold is great if you have a trustworthy buyer that’s not operating legally, in which case you can… Turn it into cash. Woops.
$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
IOUs based off of gold are a literally significant part of how many modern fiat currencies started.
What in the hell do you need to spend $50M on, right away?
Not to mention gold being around 1.4x more valuable per weight.
Those weights of either gold or currrency are going to require a vault or armored car and a crew of people with a forklift to either store or hold or move anywhere.
You’re gonna be bringing both to a bank.
Suddenly showing up with or trying to spend or sell those volumes of either gold or cash is going to get you a visit from the IRS, Secret Service, and FBI, and maybe CIA.
So only go with bills if they’re in denominations >$100. I guess this would work better with euros.
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.
wolframalpha says the gold is worth about $22m more, but it’s a no-brainer. gimme the cash ($50m). the extra ‘value’ in the gold is not worth the extraordinary measures needed to deal with it.
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)
for a little while, yah ;)
WWII killed the 500 bill (that was gold-backed at the time) so now ppl have to smuggle gold.
Reminds me, that we are sadly phasing out €500
But steel is heavier than feathers…
Only if you can live with you’ve done to those poor birds.
Drop it on your foot to see…
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.
Cash, the value be dammed. Im not trying to sell fucking gold. Im not a fucking merchant
you can visit my local pawn shop, they give cash for gold
70m in gold pls
Okay, here’s your five dollars. Thank you for your business.
You don’t sell the gold. You take 10x loans of gold’s worth and use it as collateral. Like banks and billionaires do. Well maybe 100x…
I’d choose gold. AFAIK most all money laundering rules deal with cash.
Even if a geine were to give you 500 tons of cash or gold, some governments may have a problem with that and choose to redistribute it.
Choosing gold makes the value much more liquid in my opinion.
Not to mention that gold doesn’t rot (unlike USD). In today’s economy gold is probably more value-dense (as in, a pound of gold is worth more than a pound of hundered-dollar bills).
Currencies also come and go but gold stays. If you’re thinking long-term, gold is the vastly better choice.
If that works for you, fine. Im sticking with cash. The government doesnt know I have it, they wont know to look for it. And it wont start rotting in my lifetime.
Besides, you never know when the FBI might show up.
I could see FBI showing up if you try to do something with 500 kg of dollar bills as well.
Depending where you are you might not be able to put a that amount of cash in your bank, although it’s easier to use.
O, very little would actually get deposited. But all my groceries and eating out and booze and lots of video games and hobbie shit will just get paid for in cash.
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.
Same would be required for 50M in cash not to mention Taxes.
Btw cash is 50M gold is ~90M
(And yes the “M” dose mean Monopoly money)
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.
Depends on the dealership, heh
Yet another way society is biased against the poor. A rich guy shows up with a briefcase full of money and nobody bats an eye, it’s just another day. A poor guy shows up with a briefcase full of money and then suddenly everyone starts asking questions, and if he doesn’t have good enough answers he might get thrown in jail.
What if I mowed a rich guy’s lawn and he gave me a really big tip? No, I don’t remember his name. No, I didn’t keep the address. It was over there somewhere, go that way, it’s the big house with the mown lawn. You’ll find it, just keep looking…
US law requires any cash transaction of $10,000 or more be reported to the IRS/Treasury Dept. to include the federal tax ID # of both parties/entities, and the deposit accounts involved.
5002 $9999 transactions
Yup that looks very normal to me. Probably looks nothing suspicious to your FBI agent either.
Structurization.
I know someone who worked in a software company that developed algorithms and systems for banks and gambling to detect these.Yep.
Literally pulling out $9,999 instead of $10,000… that in and of itself is a crime, even if you’re not actually doing anything funny with it.
You don’t think you’ll be investogated for a massive gold transaction?
Whussat, in single dollar bills, so about a grand per kilo? VS about a hundred grand per kilo?
Or we talking 100 dollar bills, so, about the same?
… Volume may be the deciding factor.
… Wait. Can’t we just skip to the end already, provision everybody with the emancipatory technologies, radically transforming our economy, obsoleting the need for money…?
You can see that they are 100s in the picture
If they’re worth about the same, I’ll still take the gold then. My logic being: 1. I’m not American. 2. I just think having a big pile of gold is cooler.
Gold is really dense. It wouldn’t be that big of a pile. Still worth a shitload, though.
Still a bigger pile of gold than I have now lol
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…
First off, it feels fully wrong to hear about “US notes” instead of bills. I know they are notes, but it feels like hearing someone say exclamation mark instead of point or vice versa. One feels natural to some people, the other for others. Just feels so weird.
Also, depending on how you’re obtaining these 500kg of US notes, anything above 100 dollar bills is basically just for bank transfers and you’ll have a helluva time using it for anything if it wasn’t obtained legally. They’re tracked pretty well. The vast majority of Americans don’t even know they exist, I’d say, and have surely never seen one.
ETA: I’m mistaken! Apparently those larger bills were legal tender, just rare. It’s the 100k gold certificate that was only for bank transfers
Yep. They discontinued the larger denominations because they were primarily used for corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, etc. Guess why Trump wants to introduce a new 250 Dollar bill? And with his own face on it? The face of corruption on the bill of corruption.
Selling shit is a nightmare, fuck the pound-to-value maths, just give me the money.
But gold is heavier than bank notes
You do realize that if you take either the gold or the cash you’re still roughly a billion dollars away from being a billionaire? At $72m you still have about 93% of the way to go before you hit even one billion. Elon is currently somewhere north of $700bn.
I’m just pointing this out because many people don’t realize how excessively rich billionaires actually are. Many still seem to think we’re talking about cutting into people’s rainy day savings when we’re calling for billionaire’s fortunes getting taxed. And nobody earns that kind of money.
With all of the above said, if it is legit and comes with no strings attached, I will gladly take the ~$70m in gold (with approximately the dimensions of a microwave). Even if I have to pay taxes on it.
While gold does incur a conversion cost when putting it in a bank account, the same is true for a large amount of cash (especially when it is in a foreign currency). And gold has an intrinsic value which only increases over time. Thanks!
Hey please explain the microwave comparison. I didn’t understand that part.
Gold has a density of 19.283 kg/l, so 500kg of Gold would only be about 26l big
Gold is really heavy, so 500 Kg fits in a small space.
For context:
500kg cash in 100 USD bills (like on the picture) would be roughly 50.000.000 USD.
And 500kg of Gold would currently be 71,396,000 USD.
I’ll take the gold, MAGA is royally fucking up the USD.
A lot of this question really hinges around one question. What do I have to tell the government?
Do I get this as a prize? A gift? An inheritance? Income? Magical Genie appearance? Do I have to launder it? Am I going to get audited?
It’s a lot harder to explain bundles of cash. Remove any identifying marking on the gold and claim it as marine salvage.
Except I dont own a boat, scuba gear and cant provide a lick of evidence that its marine salvage if even the most basic question is asked.
Its a lot easier to gradually introduce cash into my life without generating a paper trail.
Classic. Well done ?
What about… 500 kgs of Bitcoin?
What about 500 kgs of your momma!
Damn. Now that’s a lotta momma.
would you take 500 kgs of bitcoin or 500 kgs of monero?
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.
I take the gold. I like shiny gold and dollar bills would look stupid in my hoard.
