How much gold is there, really?

One troy ounce

$4,200

One troy ounce: 31 grams, the weight of six US nickels, the bulk of a sugar cube. It's the unit the world prices gold in — $4,200 for this single lump today. Already the value is outrunning the size.

One kilogram bar

$134,000

A one-kilogram bar, no bigger than a chocolate bar, is worth about $134,000 — a house deposit you could slip into a coat pocket. Most investors read about this bar; few ever hold one.

The Good Delivery bar

$1.66 million

The LBMA Good Delivery bar — 12.44 kilograms, 400 troy ounces, about $1.66 million each. This is the brick the world's vaults are stacked with. You can heave one off the table with both hands, briefly — and set down more than most people earn in a decade.

One million dollars

7.5 kg

A million dollars in gold weighs just 7.5 kilograms — about 16 pounds — and fits in a small briefcase with room to spare. You can lift it. You cannot run with it. The heist movies never get this part right.

A bullion pallet

$832 million

Five hundred bars on one forklift pallet: 6.2 tonnes, roughly $832 million, and no higher than your knee. A single vault floor holds dozens — and we're still nowhere near the scale you're imagining.

Fort Knox

6.2 m cube

Fort Knox, a byword for unreachable wealth, holds 4,583 tonnes. Cast as one block it's a cube about 6.2 m per side — some $613 billion, and smaller than the house next door.

All US gold reserves

7.5 m cube

Every ounce the United States owns — 8,133 tonnes, the largest hoard any nation holds — would stack into one cube about 7.5 m on a side. The treasure of the world's reserve currency, no bigger than a two-storey house.

All central-bank gold

12 m cube

Now pool every bar in every central bank and treasury on Earth — about 36,535.4 tonnes — and you get one cube roughly 12 m per side. The monetary anchor of the whole world economy, just over four storeys of gold that wouldn't fill a city block.

All the gold ever mined

22 m cube

And this is all of it — every ring, coin and bar, every flake panned since the first riverbed six thousand years ago to the ingot cast this morning: about 213,000 tonnes. One cube roughly 22 m per side, seven storeys tall. The entire golden inheritance of our species, in a single block.