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What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? - The Straight Dope
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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I should add to this that the Spanish Dollar was devalued to the point where the gold and silver in the coins was worth more than the coins themselves, and since the Spanish didn’t dilute their coinage for a very long time, value was often based on the value of the metal in the coin — which meant that people started cutting them up as pieces of gold and silver with a known quality and a mark to prove it. That’s how we ended up with pieces of eight etc.