One Giant Gold Nugget, Millions of USB Sticks

How Many USB Flash Drive PCBs Could You Make From the Monumental Nugget of 1869?

If you crack open a USB flash drive hoping to find treasure, you’ll be disappointed—but not entirely wrong. There is gold in there. Not much, not enough to make you rich, and certainly not worth firing up a smelter in your garage. But a typical USB PCB does contain tiny amounts of gold in its connector plating and, in some cases, inside microscopic bond wires. How tiny? Most USB boards carry somewhere around 1–5 milligrams of gold—less than what sticks to your fingers after eating a Dorito.

Manufacturers use gold because it’s solder-friendly, corrosion-resistant, and makes a perfect electrical contact. Even the thinnest “gold flash” layer on connector pins can survive years of plugging and unplugging. But for recycling? Forget it. You’d need thousands of dead USB drives just to make a visible speck of gold, and tens of thousands to produce anything resembling a nugget. Still, this tiny bit of gold creates a fun thought experiment: what if we went all the way in the opposite direction? What if we took one of the largest gold nuggets ever found and asked how many USB sticks we could make from it?

That brings us to the legendary Monumental Nugget of 1869, the crown jewel of the California Gold Rush’s late years.

The Monumental Nugget was discovered on September 5, 1869, at the Sierra Buttes Mine in the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains of Sierra County, California. The discovery happened near the famous Monumental Claim, a hydraulic mining operation that blasted ancient riverbeds apart with high-pressure water cannons. A worker named John Deason—the same man who had previously struck gold in Australia—was part of the mining crew. While clearing away debris left from a storm, the team uncovered a massive lump of gold weighing in at roughly 106 pounds (48 kilograms). To this day, it remains the largest gold nugget ever found in California.

Its sheer size shocked even seasoned miners. Picture a hunk of gold about the size of a large watermelon—dense, warm in color, and unbelievably valuable. Newspapers at the time said it caused “a sensation unequaled since the early days of ’49.” People came from miles around just to catch a glimpse before it was eventually shipped off, melted down, and sold. Sadly, the nugget itself doesn’t survive; only engravings and old descriptions remain.

But for our purposes, the fun begins after the melting.

Gold content of a typical USB flash-drive PCB
→1–5 milligrams (we’ll average at 3 mg for a clean calculation)

Weight of the Monumental Nugget
→48,000 grams (48 kilograms)

Convert to milligrams
→48,000 g × 1,000 = 48,000,000 milligrams of gold

Now divide that massive total by the average amount used in one USB PCB:
48,000,000 mg ÷ 3 mg per flash drive PCB
= 16 million USB PCBs.

Sixteen million USB boards… from one rock somebody yanked out of a hillside in 1869.

To put that in perspective:

• If you laid 16 million USB sticks end-to-end, they would stretch for over 1,500 miles—farther than the entire length of California.
• It’s enough USB drives for every high-school student in America… multiple times.
• And it’s all from a single gold lump uncovered by miners who were working with shovels, sluices, and hydraulic hoses.

The irony is rich: the largest California gold nugget ever found could supply the gold plating for millions of modern USB flash drives—yet the USB drives in your drawer today are worth more as storage devices than as sources of gold.

The Monumental Nugget may have vanished into the smelters of the 19th century, but its imagined second life as a mountain of USB sticks makes you appreciate just how massive that discovery really was. It also reminds us that even in today’s world of silicon and microchips, gold still quietly connects the past to the present—one tiny PCB at a time.