Just one day after being unveiled to the public, one of the biggest gold nuggets that has ever been recovered in modern times from the historic Gold Country of Northern California has been sold.
The gold nugget was sold to a prominent collector in the Bay Area for an unspecified amount of money.
"The new owner wants to be secretive, so we can't name him," said Don Kagin from Tiburon, the coin dealer that served as the middleman between the anonymous buyer of the gold nugget and the prospector that found it.
The gold nugget, which weighs 6.07 pounds, was found back in July in the mountains of Butte County. It has been named the Butte Nugget after its place of discovery.
The seller, according to Kagin, also asked for the final sales price of the nugget to be kept a secret.
"We were asking for $400,000 and it obviously wasn't far from that," added Kagin.
The chief numismatist of Kagin, David McCarthy, said that the buyer was a collector that specialized in historical items.
McCarthy added that there were six different potential buyers that showed genuine interest and ability to buy the Butte Nugget. However, the buyer was the first among the buyers to establish an offer with the price that the seller was looking for.
The Butte Nugget drew immense interest since reports on the gold nugget were released last week. It was put up for display in the San Francisco Fall Antiques Show, drawing hundreds of spectators that wanted to take a look at the Butte Nugget.
While the gold nugget has already been sold, it will remain displayed for the public to take a look at until the antique show concludes on Sunday.
The seller of the gold nugget also requested for secrecy from the general public regarding his name and the exact location of where he found the Butte Nugget, to be able to prevent potential scammers and hordes of treasure seekers looking to find more 6-pound gold nuggets.
"But I can say he's very pleased with the sale," said McCarthy.
The new owner of the Butte Nugget, while certainly a connoisseur of the finer things in life, will probably not love gold as much a 63-year-old Indian businessman that swallowed 12 gold biscuits.
The businessman smuggled the gold biscuits, which had weights of 33 grams each, to smuggle them from Singapore to India. However, he had trouble getting the gold biscuits out of his system from natural means, and so had to resort to going to the hospital for surgery.
The gold biscuits, which would have caused serious internal damage if left longer inside the businessman's body, were confiscated by authorities.
