Ok, no. I’m calling bullshit on two fronts:

1. If a dragon is hungry, it’s eating the cow right there. So you’re not gonna see a dragon carrying a cow in the first place. If it has babies too young to hunt, it’s puking it up for them.

2. How do you think a dragon would carry gold coins? Clamped in their claws as they fly?? No, dummy, they’d hold it in their gullet and spit it out in the pile. So no duh you’ve never seen one carrying gold. Humans don’t have x-ray vision.

I’m not a murder hobo, I’m just the plumber

Then they curl up and sleep on a pile of their own shit? Im not disagreeing, I’m just a little shocked.

Ok there are bad news. Your theory makes a lot of sense when we just evaluate input and output of a dragons den. The problem is that gold is atomically more stable (Au: B/A=7.936 MeV) than carbon (C: B/A=7.468 MeV). That means that you have to explain a huge amount of energy this process consumes. This is alongside the energy that the dragon uses to live and even wastes in the whole fire spitting situation.

I believe the dwarves are the ones who shit gold, they turn ore into gold. A dragon will attack a weakened dwarf nest, kill the dwarf drones and eat the dwarf larva. Only then will it start seeking out cows, once it has depleted this bounty. This is a good thing in the long run, it keeps disease from spreading rampant between the dwarf broods

This is a lie. All the dragons I know keep geese around.

Dragons acquired their hoards by threatening to terrorize local villages if they didn’t pay its “Won’t Burninate Your Thatched Roof Cottages” tax.

Literally their ass coins