Forrest wrote:Wow, that is surprisingly small. So a chest (like the old fashioned pirate's chests) of gold at the foot of your bed would set you up for life.
Sure, if your lifestyle was relatively modest and you had anywhere to reliably sell the gold for its true value. Pawn shops and dealers are going to take a cut, remember. If you go all Scrooge McDuck... well, THEN you are starting to resemble someone genuinely wealthy with that much gold. But still less so than the 1%, probably?
The entire premise of the SERRATED EDGE books, which I just reread, is that the elves want to help people (specifically children in need), but these days if they just give them chests of magically crafted gold it sends up waaaaay too many red flags and it's the kids or their parents who are harmed by that. So instead, they needed a money laundering scheme. The good elves decided that racing cars was fun, so they set up a racing company to manufacture cars with non-steel components (magically produced, though they pretended otherwise) and got really into the engineering side of things.
The fact is, electronic currency is waaaaay easier, but much more vulnerable. It's hard to carry off a lot of gold, but relatively easy to commit identity theft.