Lets suspend disbelief and imagine that your wildest dreams come true: the price of Gold rockets to tens of thousands, then immediately hundreds of thousands, and then millions of US Dollars per ounce.
Well, Now you've got a problem and bad news because it turns out that Gold is literally everywhere, it's in the dirt in the ground everywhere, gold rains down from above from stellar dust via ancient supernova all the time, and if you dig a 1 foot by 1 foot hole in the dirt near any stream of water, there's at the very least 1 grain of rice size's amount of gold in there, you just need to filter it out.
And so therefore if the price of that rice grain of gold increases beyond the "3 hours of a labor" a motivated individual and his bucket would need to put that grain of rice of gold into his snifferbottle, then immediately 3 billion people will begin:
1. Getting a bucket.
2. Visiting the nearest water source.
3. Dig a hole, filter it out by hand.
4. centrifuge out the gold.
5. Sell it at market and get insta-rich, 3 hours of work produces 900 hours of the proceeds of minimum wage labor.
Once 3 billion people do this, and say: "holy shit, gold is literally free money from thin air just bucket it out of the ground and centrifuge it out", and then supply and demand kicks back in, and reduces the price of this 1 grain of rice's worth of Gold back to where it belongs, 10 minutes of labor and not 3 hours or 9 hours of minimum wage labor.
And you can be absolutely 100% certain that this ceiling lid price of Gold will inflict once you all realize how simple it is to yank gold out of the ground. The price of Gold can only rise to this point and no further. You then realize these things are a thing, and now panning for gold is useless again because the price of gold is yanked back down again, by the joint efforts of 3 billion people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxSlkvMQk1w
