The viable metric is literally the volume of gold depicted multiplied by the weight of such a large pile of gold that seems to be damn near limitless in value. That’s what we used to calculate that Smaug only has 5 billion to 15 billion USD of gold, minus the Arkenstone.
The rest of the metric comes from the treasure tables of various dragons in various RPG systems that say that the absolute most value of any dragon’s hoard is only 500,000 oz worth of gold. That’s split between everything. Not just their gold. 500,000 oz of gold is 5,000,000 gold pieces of gold. That’s merely 1.2 billion USD, and that’s just the richest of the greediest and oldest evil dragons that are required by their goddess to hoard before they are dead of old age.
The viable metric is literally the volume of gold depicted multiplied by the weight of such a large pile of gold that seems to be damn near limitless in value. That’s what we used to calculate that Smaug only has 5 billion to 15 billion USD of gold, minus the Arkenstone.
The rest of the metric comes from the treasure tables of various dragons in various RPG systems that say that the absolute most value of any dragon’s hoard is only 500,000 oz worth of gold. That’s split between everything. Not just their gold. 500,000 oz of gold is 5,000,000 gold pieces of gold. That’s merely 1.2 billion USD, and that’s just the richest of the greediest and oldest evil dragons that are required by their goddess to hoard before they are dead of old age.