>>1793399Nigga, prospecting for gold NEVER was profitable. It's always just bunch of schmucks that help to locate the gold with their "I'm gonna find a single nugget and get rich with it" mentality and then the big mining company tears the place apart with heavy equipment and bunch of workers.
If you have good spot, you are going to get 1 g of gold from 1 tone of dirt. So for 1 ounce, you need 28 tones of dirt that's full of gold. Do you have any fucking idea how much of dirt that is? And you plan to what? Pan it?
As some anon noted already itt, you are more likely to get yourself trained in searching for gems an fossils, rather than trying to prospect for gold
Also
>California>GoldYeah, 150 years ago. Any profitable stakes and locations have been mined out dry by 1900s, the decade. Then a bunch of people tried during the Depression to find more, but it quickly turned out it was easier to just go to Mexico and try there (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is partially based on actual swarms of Depression-era Americans prospecting there - and most of them found shit) that find any sort of profitable stakes in Cali: food cost more than the gold they could get there.
Today it's basically a hobby for people that enjoy washing dirt for handful of shiny grains
