Block of Gold

Blocks of Gold (also known as Gold Blocks) are decorative blocks that do not appear in normally generated maps anywhere.

Gold blocks are susceptible to destruction from TNT, and only require approximately 1 second to mine successfully.

Gold blocks can be crafted by placing 9 gold ingots in a crafting grid. The gold blocks can then be crafted back into 9 ingots again (even in your inventory), making them more useful as "storage units" rather than building units. They were used in the recipe to make a more powerful variation of Golden Apples.

Mining a gold block drops itself (rather than ingots) as long as an iron or higher level pickaxe is used; thus, no resources are lost. However, if one is broken without such a pickaxe, it drops nothing, wasting all 9 of the ingots it was made of.

As a Crafting Material
(added in 12w21a)

History
Blocks of Gold had a different skin when it first debuted. The skin was changed from in the Survival 0.26 update to, and was modified to use the top texture on all sides during the Halloween Update. However, in Classic it is still seen as.

In Survival Test gold blocks could be obtained by destroying gold ore blocks.

In early versions of Survival, gold blocks resisted explosions; however, this is no longer the case.

As of Beta 1.9 pre5, the texture was modified, having less drastic dark gradients in the top-left and bottom-right corners.

Gold (Block) Gold (Block)/es Or (bloc) Gold (Block)/ko Goud (blok) Złoto (blok) Золото (блок) 金块