No matter how you look at it, Latinum has to be the most inconvenient medium of trade. We know that anti-grav units don't work on DS9 so how could Quark move that much Latinum around? Either the bars are of a super light metal plated with gold, are a very light weight gold alloy, or there's something else going on. That's still 1,541.4 lbs in Quark's case during the evacuation. If a bar were made of this alloy, it would weigh in at 2.569 lbs each. Silver has a density of 10.49 g/cm 3 (0.379 lbs/in 3) and copper has a density of 8.94 g/cm 3 (0.323 lbs/in 3). A rich yellow gold alloy has 9 carats (9 parts out of 24, or 37.5%) with the other 62.5% made up of silver and copper (31.25% each). So if it's not that kind of gold, what is it? Well, a search of some common gold alloys yields information about other types of gold.

Unless Quark had an anti-grav unit, I don't think he's picking up a literal ton of gold. May not sound like much, but when you consider Quark tried to evacuate with 600 bars of Latinum, that means his case contained 2,235.6 lbs (over a ton) of gold. Since the volume of the bar is known to be 5.34375 in 3, the total weight of a bar of latinum is 3.726 lbs each. Gold has a density of 19.3 g/cm 3, or 0.697 lbs/in 3. If we assume that the amount of latinum in that bar is minuscule compared with the amount we know goes into 100 bricks, we can simply assume that the weight of a bar is only that of the gold. While the exchange rate from bars to bricks is unknown, what is known is the size of a single bar of Latinum, measured at 4.75 x 0.5 x 2.25 inches. That's quite a lot of gold for such a small amount of latinum. That tiny amount is supposed to fill 100 bricks of this: I was watching DS9: Who Mourns for Morn and I saw this particular image at the end of the episodeĪccording to Quark, that's enough Latinum for 100 bricks or so.

Gold pressed latinum coin