They might be enchanted to be lighter as a convenience. That would throw off Harry’s arbitrage calculations, though.
[Edit:] I didn’t think of this before, but I’d expect Harry to notice if they were significantly lighter (a factor of ten) than gold; even if he never handled gold, a factor of ten would make them lighter than aluminium. He’d have asked about it. Is their actual size mentioned anywhere in MoR? Perhaps Eliezer just departed from canon because it didn’t make much sense.
My thinking was more mundane; gold foam with a solid shell. But yeah, seems like there’s a lot of possible sources of error in the size/weight of a Galleon magic or no. Still, given the volatility of the Muggle marketplace and the isolation of the wizarding world in general, it seems likely that some arbitrage opportunities exist.
Not that I should care about the destruction of a fictional economy, but I much prefer the idea that arbitrage is only, say, 10%, and Harry decides to strike a long term business relationship with the goblins rather than taking an adversarial position and crashing the market in a big way. He could even introduce the idea of representational currency, which ought to be worth quite a bit to the goblins.
They might be enchanted to be lighter as a convenience. That would throw off Harry’s arbitrage calculations, though.
[Edit:] I didn’t think of this before, but I’d expect Harry to notice if they were significantly lighter (a factor of ten) than gold; even if he never handled gold, a factor of ten would make them lighter than aluminium. He’d have asked about it. Is their actual size mentioned anywhere in MoR? Perhaps Eliezer just departed from canon because it didn’t make much sense.
My thinking was more mundane; gold foam with a solid shell. But yeah, seems like there’s a lot of possible sources of error in the size/weight of a Galleon magic or no. Still, given the volatility of the Muggle marketplace and the isolation of the wizarding world in general, it seems likely that some arbitrage opportunities exist.
Not that I should care about the destruction of a fictional economy, but I much prefer the idea that arbitrage is only, say, 10%, and Harry decides to strike a long term business relationship with the goblins rather than taking an adversarial position and crashing the market in a big way. He could even introduce the idea of representational currency, which ought to be worth quite a bit to the goblins.
Given what I’ve seen about goblins up to now, I’d rather expect their reaction to be somewhere between “ROTFLMAO” and “Blasphemy!!!1!!”