Sort-of memes that are cracking you up at the moment

The problem with the meme is that it significantly underestimates the amount of gold Smaug is sitting on

Agreed.

"An entire mountain full of almost nothing but solid gold" would have to be at least 1000 times as much as that.

Surprisingly, not quite that much. Since you enjoy a good technicality, Mount Wycheproof in Australia, the world’s smallest registered mountain, stands at 43m above the surrounding countryside. It’s not clear whether it’s a conical frustrum or more of a sphere cap, but by guesstimating its radius based on Google pics showing its height (*1.5r:1h), I reckon it has a volume of some 300,000m^3. Still much more than the Forbes estimate, but encouragingly less than 1 mill m^3. I have no idea what the canonical volume of the Lonely Mountain would be, and we don’t know enough about dwarven architecture and mining techniques to know how much of it would be solid rock.

^^^Love this shit

No wonder he had that Smaug look on his face

Better than the meme

If the gold is in the form of coins and trinkets then there'll be some packing factor as well, and so 20-40% (?) of the volume will be air.

And we’re assuming it’s all 24K gold, which would be unlikely if the bounty contains coins and jewellery.

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Have you not watched Lord of the Rings or something? They didn’t have bubble wrap back then you noob!

At this point we're arguing over nickels, once the pile of gold is big enough to bed down a 60 foot dragon, the fact that it's loosely packed 9ct shit doesn't alter the fact that he's richer than Bezos.

This blog post asks whether a radical rethinking of Laketown monetary policy could have stimulated Middle Earth GDP following the shock of Smaug taking so much money out of circulation. Should have come off the gold standard and introduced fiat currency.
https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2012/12/the-macroeco.html

It's all goblets and boxes and ruby's and shit, probably on top of a big stone mound or some bollocks so not actually that high. Although, if there's a bit of mithril in the pile then all bets are off.

A challenger appears

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I mean, that's just unrealistic, a duck couldn't swim through coins.

Or pull off those cuffs.

Yes, Forbes says McDuck is top, but as we've shown their estimates are off, and they don't elaborate which inflator they're using to compare characters who hold most of their wealth in specie with those, such as Kane, whose wealth was mainly in stock, and across a poorly defined time domain.

have no idea what the canonical volume of the Lonely Mountain

I'm going to take a punt and suggest that when Tolkien wrote about Smaug sitting on a mountain of gold, it was metaphorical. Risky take for a work of epic fantasy fiction, I know.

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At this point we're arguing over nickels

Oh I thought we’d established agreement that Smaug > Bezos, and the matter had moved onto establishing the size of the dragon’s hoard.

In any case, afaik Tolkien himself wasn’t very clear on Smaug’s size. Exhibit A (below) shows a canonical treasure pile only a few times larger than your first estimate. If the depiction is correct-ish, the Forbes calculation and ergo the meme would likely be correct-ish.

(Yea I realise the gold might be 30m deep and extend outside of the frame, but it’s not 1 million m^3)

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^

is that bezos in the bottom right?

I know it’s a repost but…

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Hugo making us work for it again

Ha!

Sounds like the Glasto tribute was very realistic.

Read that as Enron and and just went along with it. Yeah they probably own the colours and they fucked them all up, or something, the bastards.

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