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.

Hey please explain the microwave comparison. I didn't understand that part.

Yes but have you considered that bank notes are lighter than gold?

You can see that they are 100s in the picture

It's a lot harder to explain bundles of cash. Remove any identifying marking on the gold and claim it as marine salvage.

Yeah, but what's more liquid? I can take those 100s and pay most of my expenses in cash for the rest of my life.

If I take the gold bars, I would have to find a buyer or find a way to convert it into cash. I'm sure most people and places will have questions about how I got the gold bars.

ITT: having less limmy reference than expected and took it literally

You would have to pay taxes, and that's fine. But how do you report a sudden windfall of fifty million dollars in cash?

Yeah, oh no I have to pay taxes on a massive windfall… Fuck off with that, I want my society to function. I get that it's a big chunk, but it's also free money.

Good luck liquidating 500kg of gold without someone taking a decent cut. Gold doesn't always increase in value, it's a highly volatile commodity and atm is highly over speculated. More than likely whenever trump dies or leaves the office the market will correct itself to pre-pandemic pricing.

When people who don't understand what fiat currency is get scared by geopolitical instability they buy gold. Whenever those geopolitical instabilities absolve themselves they sell.

You'd probably be better off taking cash and investing it into index stock then taking the time and money to store, transport, and sell that much gold. There's a reason why billionaires are building Scrooge McDuck vaults and swimming in bullions.

Could be that only the outer ones are 100 dollar bills while the inner ones are 1 Dollar bills because they are the same size.

Fun Fact: This is bad for accessibility, thats why the Euro has three indicators for blind people to find the right bill: different sizes, a feelable line structure on the side and different colors for those that can are legally blind but still can see some rough colors.

It'd be $100,000 because they're $100 bills

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.