Nick Szabo  🔑

Does anyone have a chart or data showing the market caps of aboveground, physical monetary gold vs. silver? Goal is to calculate gold's market dominance over time.

Thanks. Is there an approximation from before that? Was there 5x times more silver tonnage in circulation than gold, or 20x? Trying to avoid unit bias.

Very hard to get accurate measures for global stocks back then. I've never seen any. We can only really estimate it in 20th century because we have reliable global production data, which adds up to the majority of stockpiles if you count it.

Silver is about 19x as abundant in the earth's crust, so perhaps it's reasonable to assume the aboveground supply was about 19x the tonnage of gold (before industrial use of Ag). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust …

Fun fact from reading Ibn Khaldoun: alchemists claim the 13:1 ratio of abundance of silver to gold in earth is due to the moon making 13 rotations around the earth for each rotation the earth makes around the sun.