Gold sink is an economic process by which a video game's ingame currency ('gold'), or any item that can be valued against it, is removed.
The term is comparable to timesink, but usually used in reference to game design and balance, commonly to reduce inflation when commodities and wealth are continuously fed to players through sources such as gold taps; such as quests, looting monsters, or minigames.
Passive gold sinks may be in operation at all times to slowly extract value from the game.
Zack Booth Simpson cites one example in Ultima Online when the NPC vendors carried blue tinted armor that couldn't be made by players.
[2] The feedback control system used in Alter Aeon works by tracking the total amount of money in the game in order to dynamically adjust drop rates and shop prices.
When a resource such as a sword is destroyed through garbage collection, those three units of iron will go back into the mines of the virtual world for extraction.
Greater methods of currency spending can be implemented when players accumulate more wealth than intended.
As currency entered the economy at a greater pace, new "luxury" items were sold at high prices for the purpose of reducing large sums of money.
In Kingdom of Loathing, the massive acquisition of "meat" (the currency of the game) through exploitation of bugs led to the implementation of new high priced items that gave no in-game benefits (simply rare collectibles) to the player to eliminate excess currency.
Unique to Old School RuneScape is a literal Gold Sink the player can build in their kitchen, requiring materials totalling hundreds of millions of in game currency to create.