[Rebel_Ace]

"...Also, when it comes to gold, keep in mind that the more of it you find, the less it is worth. Gold has been pretty stable since we discovered most of the exploitable gold on Earth by the end of the 19th century. Open up a bunch of mines on other planets, and it would lose stability again..."

Gold (as well as Diamonds) have great practical use for things like electrical circuits or cutting tools. Let them get cheap. Imagine electronic devices with pure gold circuitry because it is cheap enough to do so. Imagine something equally cool with scads of cheap diamonds.

[PIF]

There are already scads of diamonds - De Beers sits on mountains of them to keep the price artificially high. I read somewhere if they released all their diamonds, the vlaue would be zip.