I've read the last several pages of this forum and I'm surprised no one has questioned the following:
The White Paper says that until they can earn enough money mining crypto to buy enough physical gold to back each token with $1 worth of gold, they will back the tokens with gold in the ground, by making deals with mining companies that control a sufficient quantity of proven reserves (gold in the ground). This is ridiculous.
There is only one reason that located underground gold is still underground -- it takes a great deal of money to get it, to mine it. Sure, there's value to the mining rights of proven gold reserves, but that value is the price of gold minus all mining costs (uncertain until totalled up after mining). Profit margins are typically slim. And by the way, many proven reserves will remain underground indefinitely, too costly to mine unless the price of gold increases a bit, or enormously, depending.
Bottom line, taking a lease on proven gold reserves isn't going to get anyone anywhere close to backing hundreds of millions or three billion "UNY" or "DID" tokens at $1 of worth of gold per token. This will become apparent when the froth subsides and there's a normal state of price discovery.
This is a very interesting point. Hopefully we will get more detailed information from the updated whitepaper after the swap. What else do you know about mining precious metals? Such as silver, platinum and palladium. Does the same concept apply to these other metals too? 3 additional tokens are supposed to be released backed by these metals after the swap, you think there is a mining advantage with the other metals? You mention that if the price were to increase it would make more financial sense to mine it. Any guess on approx. %? a bit to enormous is a big and vague range.
Never mind about gold that's too expensive to mine. Ramping up from discovery to production typically takes two or three years, and then production usually grows in stages. Because mining is so expensive and time horizons long, there exist exploration-only companies who sell their interests in finds to production companies. Such a sale price is probably never more than maybe 5% of what the proven reserves will eventually be worth when unearthed and extracted; still, that 5% will be good money to the explorer and ideally will more than make up for their unsuccessful projects. (These deals aren't calculated by percentage; I'm just using what might be an end result of all considered factors.) So... my point was that UNY or DIG cannot honestly state that gold (or platinum, or silver, or any mineral) in the ground represents the price of gold at market. The White Paper actually says that every DIG token will from the start have $1 worth of gold backing it. I'm saying that if they're going by proven and probable reserves they've secured, that it's more like 5 cents worth of gold backing each token, because gold in the hand is worth 20x, or 30x (whatever) than gold in the ground.