Okay, so let's say you have a King who wished that "everything he touched turned to gold". Now...

The same way diamonds are kept valuable.

Tricking people into thinking they are valuable while being able to relatively easily create it?

I think the main problem is handling the body in the first place since you need gold plated gloves and tools.

A marketing campaign to make women think that diamonds are the best way for men to show their love?

His body will always be covered by a thin layer of gold, so you will be fine.

Getting an effective monopoly then only selling very small amounts to keep the prices absurdly high

But there isn't an effective monopoly right now, and prices are rising.
It's the marketing campaign that made every woman want a diamond engagement ring that did the trick
Also diamonds are the one thing i'll never buy even if i ever end up filthy rich

For the vast majority of human history diamonds came from one area and were a pain in the ass to mine

>The best question is how do you prevent inflation once you got a source of infinite gold

By controlling yourself and not making so much gold that it greatly affects commodity prices. Also, exchange your gold for other trade goods, precious metals, art pieces, investments, and currency. The value of those things might not be affected so much by the price of gold, so they will remain valuable even after you lose your mind and print out a whole island made of gold.

And then, when you think you're going to die soon, just go hog fucking wild with production and crash gold prices into the ground. Let that be your legacy: the man who dropped gold to the same price as slag.

The fire would turn to gold.

>Let that be your legacy: the man who dropped gold to the same price as slag.

>>Let that be your legacy: being born son of a warlord in an area with easily accessible gold, not understanding it's value, squandering it, and his homeland has remained a poverty stricken shithole while the Arabs laughed all the way to Mecca

Submersion in something. Nothing too hot such that it destroys his body and thus the enchantment, but also something that wont cause the majority of his flesh to rot away and thus lose the enchantment. Keeping it within sterile freezing cold salt water would work, and you would then simply need to send in divers to peel away the thin film of gold that would develop over his body.

Brineing his body as soon as possible to prevent rot is paramount, and will make him rot at a monumentally slow pace compared to before. Eventually his flesh is going to rot down to bones, at this point his body will become much easier to work, until disarticulation occurs.Unfortunately then you have to figure out what is still considered his body, and use that. You're not going to get all that much gold from him over the long haul and it wouldn't compete all that well with gold mining.

Why this works the way it does: Magic works partially on symbolism. The wish for everything he touches to turn to gold only works on what is considered his actual body. Parts that come off it, such as inner organs, are considered no longer his body, and thus stop changing things to gold. His wish also didn't make his body invulnerable, so its still possible to dessicate and rot to an extent. Heat will destroy that flesh, no longer making his body existent and thus ruin the enchantment. We don't conceive of the ground and plants and other things as composed and made up of the bodies of others, they are their own objects and thus the symbolism of the magic does too.

Won't any rot be prevented because the microbes that cause tissue to break down be turned into gold?

It depends on whether the magic considers his own gut and other body parts flora as part of his body. Considering we need that gut flora to digest food, I would go with yes it's part of his body, and those microbes are also responsible for a bit of the rot that occurs after death. But it could go the other way and go strictly the outer layer of cells upon his skin, at which point the rot from inside still destroys the body and eventually the skin. Or it could go with all the cells that are genetically his, at which point his body desiccates as the water is removed from his body, causing it to mummify or be torn apart as the water that resides in his cells is turned to gold as it exits and his body becomes golden throughout.

Or something else, since the OP never quite specified the rules for this.

That's true, but that's not what we're talking about

You really need to open up a history book once in a while, dude

Would the magic turn to gold?

Golden light, maybe.

>Gee wilikers, this Mansa fella sounds like the Negros back home. What a swell guy.

Given that we're dealing with magic, the spell would probably fail as soon as the king died. The corpse wouldn't possess the "essence" of the king, presumably.

Of course if it's magic, it probably wouldn't work the way OP describes in the first place.

>Altar of Infinite Molten Gold
>Suddenly gold is worthless

Way to crash the nascent global economy.

Do you understand how heat works? The body would be burned away at the 1,064°C needed to melt gold. It would probably take a very loose reading of "body" by the GM to have the ashes keep the transmuting properties. At which point you are going to still be fundamentally limited by the solubility of the ash contents in molten gold.

OP already said the effect works on air in contact with the body, so there is no need to apply anything to the body to cause gold to form, even modern research quality vacuum equipment has problems preventing monolayer formation in practical time frames (longer than seconds.)

Depending on the thickness of the gold layer, the gold could be able to be peeled off in sheets like gold leaf, which does not stick well to human skin (based on cursory reading of gold leaf makeup needing adhesives.)

If the magic is forming a gold layer less than the ~25 microns of gold leaf, you could very well be wasting your time with any "repeatable" removal technique. It might be more practical to toss the body in as large a container of aqua regia as you can find and hope for the best. At that point it is a matter of how quickly the gold layer forms. If it is a fast transmutation of the aqua regia to gold, you could make a lot of gold in a large volume of aqua regia. If it is a slow transmutation you are going to dissolve the body without much gold formation. But, again if you have a slow transmutation to gold of a layer than is very thin, there might not be a practical method. There is no stipulation that Midas Touch is anything other than a curse.

>Ashes still turn everything they touch to gold
>Dissolve
>Atoms of molecules that comprised the ash turn everything to gold

now you fucked up

Damn dude you dumb

>>Altar of Infinite Molten Gold
>>Suddenly gold is worthless

>Way to crash the nascent global economy.

Please let this meme die. Commodity money doesn't crash the way fiat money does. Gold becomes less valuable, not worthless. Infinite or near infinite anything is still of infinite or near infinite value. If something that was once rare becomes common, new uses are found for it which increases the market from mostly decorative to more practical applications.

Look at what happened with aluminum, it went from being something to place on top of the then world's tallest structure, the Washington Monument, to something we keep shitty beer in. Examples for cheap gold: most cooking ware would be better in gold then the metals we use now, gold coatings on stuff instead of paint when you are looking for weather resistance, gold paper weights, gold door stops, gold bullets, etc.

Normally they would be attempting to turn the gold they are dissolved in to gold, and therefor doing nothing useful. I guess you could add other molten metals to your pot of gold which would eventually turn the other metal to gold. The effect would take longer an longer as the gold + king solution became more and more dilute with king.

Assuming burnt king is still magic.

Big ass jell-o mold

There would have to be a constant inflow of the sacrificial material and the furnace may have to be replaced every few decades as it is slowly worn away. This would be like maintaining a boiler and furnace of a typical steam engine.