It's a fact, from the first large scale Rio Tinto mines in Roman times that used hydralic washing (redirected rivers) to todays mega super pits, the total resource requirements per unit gold have climbed.
Today you can see this (subject to access | subscription) in industry Production All-in Sustaining Cost (AISC) Data
which might convince you that gold is somehow cyclically hard to recover and the cost per unit ebbs and flows .. but the long term (50 year, 100 year) truth is that gold becomes increasingly more resource intensive to extract.
Which makes sense when you consider that it no longer just lies about on the surface in the same frequency as it once did (yes, you can still find surface nuggets .. but they are fewer and fewer).
Today you can see this (subject to access | subscription) in industry Production All-in Sustaining Cost (AISC) Data
People write essays such as:
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/06/28/under-the-micros...
and articles such as:
https://www.xetra-gold.com/en/gold-news/news/gold-production...
You can see decade long snapshots such as:
https://www.gold.org/goldhub/gold-focus/2023/04/gold-miners-...
which might convince you that gold is somehow cyclically hard to recover and the cost per unit ebbs and flows .. but the long term (50 year, 100 year) truth is that gold becomes increasingly more resource intensive to extract.
Which makes sense when you consider that it no longer just lies about on the surface in the same frequency as it once did (yes, you can still find surface nuggets .. but they are fewer and fewer).