system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Was gold easier to find in the past?

History tells us that ancient civilizations had hoards and hoards of gold, which seems odd considering their lack of modern mining capabilities. Was gold more easily found in the past? In the history of gold, there was surely some that was much more easily accessible, leaving only the increasingly less accessible to all future miners.

Is that right? Like gold could have just been lying around at some point. Don't know if I'm even making sense lmao.
gpt
This is exactly correct—it's a case of diminishing returns. We'll never run out of mined resources such as gold; they'll only become more expense to locate and refine.

As John McPhee writes in the context of the California gold rush (*Annals of the Former World*, emphasis mine):

*"Into the quiet country of the low Sierra—between the elevations of one thousand and four thousand feet—gold seekers spread more rapidly than an explosion of moles. Their technology was as rampant as they were, and in its swift development anticipated the century to come. In 1848, the primary instrument for mining gold was a sheath knife. **You pried yellow metal out of crevices.** Within a year or two, successively, came the pan, the rocker, the long tom, and the sluice—variously invented, reinvented, and introduced."*

*"By the end of 1848, a few thousand people, spread out over a hundred and fifty miles, have removed from modern stream placers ten million dollars in gold. The forty-eighters have the best of it in 1849, because the forty-niners are travelling most of that season, at the end of which fifty thousand miners are in the country. There are a hundred and twenty thousand by the end of 1855. **The lone miner all but disappears. To stay abreast of the sophisticating technologies, individuals necessarily form groups. Groups are crowded out by corporations. More and more miners make less and less money, until many independents are living hand-to-mouth and their way of life is called subsistence mining.** Watching companions die of disease in Central American jungles or drown in Cape storms, they have travelled thousands of miles in pursuit of a golden goal that has now turned into “mining for beans.” Always, though, there are fresh stories going east—stories that would cause almost anyone to start thinking about trying the overland route, the isthmus, the Horn."*

Currently, refining technology has been improved to the point that the waste ("tailings") from former mines is now valuable. Concentrations that 19th- and 20th-century operators considered insignificant are now higher than anything we can easily find in the ground.