If they kept it a secret, they could sell the gold continuously while the value slowly crashes, and still make a ton of money. But if you tell the world you can make gold for "free", the value craters overnight and you get nothing.

Jesus. Imagine if we could make gold cheap enough to make into soda cans. They wouldn't even need that plastic liner. A truly infinitely recycleable solution to packaging of all sorts. Imagine if the bag on the inside of cereal boxes was made from gold foil. What's so great about gold is it's incredibly chemically stable. That means it won't interact chemically with any food you package in it. And it's an element, not some forever chemical that will pollute our bodies and environment.

I want to see a world where all cheap disposable packaging is made out of gold.

GWth means 1GW of thermal energy, nothing to do with tons.

The paragraph of note from the preprint paper:

Under this simplification, there are ∼ 1.12 × 1028 fusion reactions per year in a 1 GWth fusion device. Assuming neutron multiplication is dominated by (n, 2n) reactions, in order to achieve a TBR = 1.2, at an absolute minimum 20% of all fusion reactions must have a corresponding (n, 2n) reaction in the blanket; as a less conservative value, it is known that simplified blanket configurations (2 m thick, no structure, natural Li) can achieve as high as TBR ∼ 1.85 [26], in which case at least 85% of fusion reactions must have a corresponding multiplication reaction. This range corresponds to 3.7 × 103–1.6 × 104 mol/yr, or for a product with a mass of 197 amu, 732 − 3114 kg/yr of material production.

The paper seems to report an upper bound of 3000 kg/GWth/yr.

There does seems to be some conflating of GWth (GW of thermal power) with GWe(GW of electrical power). Assuming an efficiency of ~60% would make the numbers line up and that seems in the ballpark of possible conversion efficiencies.

I don't know why you got downvoted, this is genuinely the most likely reason. If they had proven this technology, they could fund themselves. Right now they just have a hypothesis

Thats exactly my point, fleece the investors, and it doesnt matter if the tech works or not.

"Nothing but worthless gold!"

still pricy

It's actually a worse conductor than copper. It's just used for contacts because it's nearly as good of a conductor and it doesn't oxidize. If you want a better conductor than copper then you want silver which to my knowledge is the best conductor out of all the base elements.

Gold does have a purpose, my point is that the value of gold, paper money, diamonds, caviar, etc. is assigned and not a real number.