Block of Gold

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

Gold blocks can be crafted by placing 9 gold ingots in a 3x3 square in a crafting grid. The gold blocks can then be crafted back into 9 ingots again (even in your inventory crafting grid), making them more useful as a compact way to store gold ingots rather than a building material. They are also used in a 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 they are broken without a pickaxe, they drop nothing, effectively causing the loss of all 9 gold ingots used to create the block.

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

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.

As of 12w32a Blocks of Gold can be used to activate a Beacon Block

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

Trivia
Gold and Iron Blocks are the only mineral blocks in Classic. Gold and Diamond Blocks are the only mineral blocks to share the same textures. Iron used to, but as of 1.8, it was changed to a more industrial look.