Bitcoin Forum

I just have read this article on asia.nikkei:

Mystery of $2bn of loans backed by fake gold in China (https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Mystery-of-2bn-of-loans-backed-by-fake-gold-in-China)

The 83 tons of purportedly pure gold that Kingold creditors held in their coffers as of June would be equivalent to 22% of China’s annual gold production.   © Reuters[/center]

"More than a dozen Chinese financial institutions, mainly trust companies, loaned 20 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) over the past five years to Wuhan Kingold Jewelry Inc. with pure gold as collateral and insurance policies to cover any losses.

Kingold is the largest privately owned gold processor in central China's Hubei province. Its shares are listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York. The company is led by Chairman Jia Zhihong, an intimidating ex-military man who is the controlling shareholder.

Well, plenty, as at least some of 83 tons of gold bars used as collateral turned out to be nothing but gilded copper. That has left lenders holding the bag for the remaining 16 billion yuan of loans outstanding against the bogus bars. The loans were covered by 30 billion yuan of property insurance policies issued by state insurer PICC Property and Casualty Co. Ltd. (PICC P&C) and other smaller insurers."

Immediately, I thought of projects that want to issue tokens of value guaranteed with gold.
Miraculously, gold-based tokens of projects can be issued based on an enormous amount of fake gold!
I used to believe that these tokens would be able to directly compete with stable coins because the USD or EUR could depreciate, but gold is more secure.
Now things are different and I have no basis to believe in those values ​​anymore, like the scandal related to Tether's Proof-of-Reserve.

Do you think gold-based projects will be affected by this fake gold scandal? Will these projects have a bright future?

I think yes, after reading the news that you quote before looks like it's gonna affect others Gold-Backed crypto project and maybe making it more negative but also positive, It's will make more people to aware to investing on this and do more deep research, Well just hope it's not really will be affected, Cheers.

Unless they have proper certification or some license I steer clear of gold-backed coins because of two reasons first they are quite expensive and secondly if the project turns out to be a scam then we will lose a big amount.

I'm not ready to take any risks with gold backed tokens, I will definitely pass by, thank you very much, if tokens can really be backed by gold then it's all based on lies still, you create that token through erc20 tokens which is extremely easy and you want people to start buying because you have gold or gold company? The risk is very huge, to get me confused I will need more than just mere proofs, check this post out too, it's mainly talking about scam gold tokens

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5258975.msg54707352#msg54707352

As far as I know and can possibly remember, there haven't been any gold-based token or gold backed project which is still functioning, at least that I can remember, unless there is any which I don't know. Nevertheless, good backed projects has shown almost all the time to be fake or scams, just a means to deceive people into investing, however this was rampant during the ICO era. Also, I can only comment if there were any gold backed project leveraging the services of this institution that just had a problem, but since there isn't any, the future of gold backed projects in the crypto space isn't bright as little to no attention is given to them.

Enough of all this gold token, they are all scam no matter how hard you want to belief in them they will fail you in the end, even the few gold backed token that works have no real proof that it's really backed by gold

Gold backed tokens have no future with blockchain technology, not until real gold companies start seeing crypto as an opportunity, all we have presently are liars who use gold name to create hype on something that's not real

I do agree with it consider about there was a lot of chance for this idea to be manipulated and the creator was offering scam token without any commodity that backed it to give a valuation for the token.
This idea has a lot of holes to be used by scammers.

We shouldn't capitalize on those scam projects that has defrauded many gullible cryptocurrency investors to generalize them all, we'll know that the cryptocurrency market was booming with such projects. Many have been taught a lesson that, not all things that associate with gold is actually an associate. There are still good projects that are backed with gold, we have several of these projects around us and here is an example:  GOLD_official  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5164058.0). They have been with us since July 2019 without anything relating to dirting reputation. The important is: don't be fool by mere hearing of a project saying "we're backed by gold" without research before invest with them.

Logically, gold is a valuable item and is very valuable in all places, so gold does not need the support of other parties to be valuable and gold also does not need to support any project to be famous, because from the beginning until now the gold has already been famous, then if there is a crypto project that says they are supported by gold, that's bullshit.

So stable coins backed by fiat are possible and coins/tokens backed by gold are not?!
Well, imho it's not difficult to build up a gold-backed-token business if you get the right contacts with a reputable gold distribution and storage company.
Many can find gold tokens easier to achieve and hold than physical gold in the same way as some hold stable coins, but this time they can profit against fiat since gold price usually goes up.
Yes, one could say that Bitcoin is a better investment for holding than gold, but that's a matter of taste (because of different levels of volatility).

Of course, reputation is a must. That's why the actual gold has to be handled by reputable, internationally recognized 3rd party.
The fake gold story is based on "gold bars" "manufactured" in the same company as the one asking for the loans (!!) and the company/products were afaik said as OK/reputable by corrupted officials.

All in all, throwing all such projects into bin without an actual thought it's a mistake.

I keep saying that I do not even trust dollar backed ones and they are as easy as sending money to your bank account, it takes maybe a day or so to send it at worst, let's say 7 days at the very latest, but at the end of the day how could they even think about doing similar on gold?

We are talking about sending gold from nation to nation which has a ton of legal things tied to it and when you are doing something as valuable as transporting gold from one place to another it is a very risky thing and costs a ton of money to send. So, at the end of the day there is no way that gold could be backing up a coin, you can try it but at the end you are going to fail it and not going to have a success with it ever with all those potential problems that could rise from the legal and shipping problems

Gold backed tokens have no future, it's been ruined by scammers already and now investors don't trust them anymore, can't blame investors since no single token that is backed by token work out well, they all turn scam

The future of gold backed tokens is easy to be judge if we are being honest with one another; If the project is limited in supply, and they are able to provide tracking proofs that they have vaulted gold in a gold vault storage; then it has 70% chances of being adopted by crypto ethusiasts. Anything other than that is zero.

I guess the company planned to pay off the loan before the lenders discovered that some of the gold collateral are fake.

Well, people should be able to regularly and randomly verify the gold in gold-backed token situation, just as we are able to verify coins and transactions on Bitcoin Blockchain.
Gold-backed token devs could have a very secure, open/transparent, public, permissionless, censorship resistant gold reserve to be one of the ways to solve the problem if they really want people to trust in their gold-backed tokens. 
Maybe good verifiers could randomly come in to the gold reserves and check things out with their special equipments. And once gold-backed token is sold, the buyer could go to the reserve center (or get someone to do it) with some numbers that match with his actual physical gold to verify it is actually there... probably kept seperately in a vault he/she controls with private keys that can be automatically assigned to buyers of digital gold?

Most gold-backed projects say they are completely legal, but people won't know the truth until they lose money.
Until now, I do not believe in coins backed by gold or oil, BTC or ETH are still more reliable currencies.

I guess that token backed gold that is still exist in the market must be audited again to prove the company has the real gold that being used to backed its issued token. Im feeling doubt about gold backed token caused by this news.

Most of these projects that are backed by gold are fake, they should show a prove and who is the custodian of such assets. This is just a cheap way to lure unsuspecting investors

Why buy shit tokens/coins when you can just buy gold jewelry or bars?
Regulations will be hawking at these entities that will deal with gold backed tokens/coins because it will be considered as securities and regulations would be strict to avoid money laundering.

That only happens when investors don't try to research a little bit. Legit projects have audits, certifications, licence that can be checked 24/7 in an actual and legit Gold vault.


Maybe because they don't want to store them in their house or to store them in a safe vault because of fees? Because legit Gold-Backed Projects tend to have small fees when compared to vaults. Also, it's easy to buy and sell this way and it's anonymous.

Might aswell buy air since you are buying non-existent gold. Try exchanging your token to gold and ship it to your house maybe you can tickle your local government cronies.

You are buying their token equivalent to the price of gold and the stored gold in the vault. You are not directly buying the actual physical gold itself. Also, It's like buying Ethereum but it's not physically existing right? then might as well buy air as you are saying instead of buying Ethereum. Also, that's the risk you take for the sake convenience and anonymity just like the risk traders taking when they submit KYC to Centralized exchange instead of using Decentralized one for the sake of convenience.

FYI, you can actually buy air and it is used in a lot of things.

You do have a really good point here, but I still think it depends on the company that you’re investing in and the people they are working with. This is a really bad news indeed, and I saw another news that a corrupt Chinese leader has been caught same time that all these things were happening and was said to have stored lots of gold in his house. And people are now suspecting that he’s part of this scam and must be the one that might have done this. Someone has already posted this topic and I read it yesterday but didn’t have the time to comment.

If there is at least one good and real gold backed coin or token is existing then it might have have gained popularity and then might be trying to be a main stream of adoption by this time. Because, it got all the reasons to keep attracting investor and users unlike most other speculative assets we are having right now. So, we do not need to rush to adopt any gold backed asset right now but must verify them before investing with them.

Until now a lot of projects supported by gold are still working very well, but people are still skeptical about the legality of the assets they offer.
No one can confirm whether the gold they say is true or just an exaggeration. If someday I really like gold, maybe I'll buy real gold instead of those tokens.

It will definitely have a huge negative impact on these projects, mainly the reputation of the projects is not good and there are a lot of doubts about it and now this news comes to increase the doubts.
For me personally, I do not trust such projects. What is the guarantee that these tokens issued by these projects have real gold assets? No one can guarantee that! If real gold is being cheated as we have seen, how can these projects be trusted?

People should really be concerned about their investment to these kind of project, they don't even know where the gold is stored neither the gold is real it's basically investing for nothing. In this case, ordinary stablecoin with assets that are audited is far a lot better than this kind of investment.

although that might be true that there are some company that probably "honest" but not gonna risk it for that.