this is to stupid and way to funny not to share.

I would just play along as long as you can. Encourage him to start looking at fancy cars and stuff.

As a certified rockhound -- I've seen this a few times. Tell him to streak test it. If the streak isn't gold - he hasn't got gold.

You can tell him from me that in situ gold has never been found in NY - while a little float can be found in some streams, but in very small quantities.

Oh -- a streak test. Get something that's raw porcelain without the coating, paint, etc. Sometimes the underside of the toilet tank lid will do - or a broken saucer.

Run the mineral down the porcelain - it will make a streak. Different minerals make different colored streaks. If the streak is gold - you have gold. If it's grey or black it's other metallic mineral. A streak doesn't lie and there's no way to fake it.

Also - rock with pyrite often contains many metals. If there is gold in it he can crush it down and if there's enough, he can concentrate it. More likely the amount will be so minute it has to be melted out of the crushed rock. This is a highly expensive process and the reason why many gold mines shut down when gold prices are low. On a small scale like your brother would need - it's not very exact and a complete PITA - and often returns anywhere from nothing to an amount that makes the headache of processing it laughable.

HTH.

WOW, that is TOO funny! The chances of him being right are likely remote, but check it out. If it turns out to be iron pyrite, you can let him know the common name for it,,,,,,,"Fool's Gold"!

And HEY, you can be "certified" by passing a test, but we have a saying in the computer industry! Garbage In, Garbage Out! Hopefully he has, but HAS he ever heard of iron pyrite?

BTW NOBODY in their right mind just buys gold! Oh SURE, they may buy jewelry and the like but if you have watched pawn stars, even THEY did some basic tests, etc... YEP! You want to sell gold that you found, you probably want to take it to an assayer, or a smelter. The smelter WILL assay it, and hallmark it. So it is better that he find out NOW, rather be one of maybe THOUSANDS that has the assayer tell them.

Steve

Plot Twist: Gold obtained from Bootlegging back in the 1919's by a Jewish gang leader, during the Prohibition Era failed to come back for it because he and his gang were arrested.

An assayer might be a good idea. They don't work for free. Maybe springing some money to find out he's got nothing but shelf specimen (inexpensive shelf specimen at that) might unclog that neuron that's not firing properly.

Depends, Steve. In Colorado gold rush era, when people took off with gold it was often still in the form of nuggets and "free" (still in the rock matrix). There's all sorts of legends of lost gold in Colorado - both raw and coined. One that is actual history is the one of gold being stolen out of a mine in a casket. They faked a death in the mine and carried it out.

You can walk below narrow gauge train tracks out by those mines and pick up rocks with free gold in them because they would fall out of loaded cars or occasionally cars would tip over.

If you can actually get a cache of rock with free gold in it depends on where you are. He's not getting it in NY. If he were in AZ or CO or some place where gold actually is, I'd not be so sure he didn't have real gold.

BTW Ken, your brother DOES know about iron pyrite, RIGHT!?!?!?!? I don't know about TODAY, but in MY day there were a LOT of cowboy films, series and the like, and nearly every one had at least ONE episode with some guy thinking he struck it rich, and it turned out to be iron pyrite.

Steve

Steve - free gold can be relatively pure or so diluted that it takes tons to process any significant amount out of the rock -- that's the whole point of having assayers. You can get extremely pure gold by panning or otherwise prospecting. You have to be where it is, though. You can only get minute amounts of "float out of NY. The NW area of the MI mitten has a little bit (the UP is native copper), and Vermont has some gold - mostly, again, float. I think there's an actual mine or two in Maryland - and then by the time you get south to Georgia, you have the country's first gold rush country (1838, twenty years before the CA gold rush). The dome of the GA capital is made of gold from that rush.

When you get into extreme gold country, it's just as likely a stolen cache is unprocessed rock as it is to be coin. Rock would be stolen cache from prospectors, mines, and the narrow gauge trains that ran from the mines. Coin, of course, was stolen from anywhere that had coin. If you look over legends (which many treasure hunters research for validity before hunting for "lost" treasures), you'll find gold country filled with legends of lost caches of both kind. Coins a lot of time were robberies such as stagecoach where the bandits hid the cache to come back to later.

It also used to be practice to bury coin on your own property to keep it safe (in preference to banks, which Americans were smart enough not to trust back then). A lot of people find those caches exploring abandoned properties with metal detectors.

So there's gold all over, in all sorts of forms to find. About the closest actual deposits of gold to Mike's brother are in the Northern hills of Vermont, though.

Let's hope he does not go to the county office with the 'gold' to pay the taxes.

With respect to telling kids to go on gold hunts, when I was in high school
I worked at a movie theater. A sister theater was an 8-plex in two buildings.
Employees there would send new employees to the other building to borrow
a bucket of 'technicolor'.

Reminds me of the army base my ex was stationed on in Germany. They sent the newbies all over the country and back to get a can of squelch. LOL.

Incidentally there's at least one state you can pay any gov fee in metal at the current rate of value. Idaho. There's a state out east, too, that's set up for metal backed currency again and might also allow it - I believe Maryland. Some M state. There might be others, I've never looked further into it. If the dollar crashes, I'll probably head to Idaho to be covered by their currency. They should already be coining it again by now. They quit outsourcing silver several years ago and were calling for investors to build a processor (with 20 years of no personal or business taxes for whoever would build one).

Sal,

I had a guest from France. He really wanted to prove to his skeptical Grandson that people
did find gold in 'dem 'dar hills by panning. They went to the Phoenix mine and had no luck.

At my suggestion, they went on Clear Creek on the way to Black Hawk and they had
had some luck - enough to show the Grandson. I suspect it was close to the place that
set tourists up to do it, when they were open.

The CARQUEST Auto Parts and Supplies store in Idaho Springs sells panning
equipment, and the owner seems to know a little.

Dan