HEEEREE's a good one for yaaahs. Ties into Bitcoin, nature of trust and money, digital ledgers, Jack Mallers' "bitcoin locked in time" element.
We get an intro with the Micronesia rock moneys ("rai"/"fei" stones), Friedman, a paraphrasing of the famous goldbug phrasing (Keynes? Buffett?!) -- dig up gold from the earth only to bury it in bank vaults!
...and obviously a company tokenizing gold they haven't mined (yet?) or never will
"tokenize the subsurface mineral rights" is so obviously a thing that the 21st century will produce: technically compliant gold resources.
Michelle Ash: “Having spent decades in the global mining industry, including my work as Chief Innovation Officer at Barrick Gold, I’ve focused on how digital mining can offer a complementary alternative to traditional extraction—one that strengthens the industry while easing pressure on the environment."
YES, obviously... you ESG-stamp your gold mining company by... not mining any gold but still counting it, selling it, and trading around tokens based on it! Beautiful.
Step 1: get a scienc-y report that says a certain area contains x ounces of gold
Step 2: "mint" digital tokens for that amount of gold, and sell them to some schmucks customers, maybe at a neat lil 10-20% discount to (currently high) gold prices??
Step 3: UUUUGEEEE fucking profits
Here's Levine summarizing the ingenuity:
Central banks that keep gold reserves at the Fed or the Bank of England, gold futures traders, investors in gold ETFs: They all spend many billions of dollars on digital tokens representing a certain amount of gold underground. The NatBridge tokens are just, you know, gold in a slightly different part of underground.
Ah, well:
A theme that I think a lot about these days is that modern finance creates layers of abstraction on top of real-world activity, and sometimes those abstractions become unmoored from the reality... gold is valuable in part because humans have valued shiny yellow jewelry for millennia, and in part because it is difficult and laborious to turn a parcel of rock into gold. [5] When you trade an electronic token entitling you to some gold in a vault, the token encapsulates all of that labor and history.
[NOTE:
Though a point that I normally make about abstract commodity space is that you need to have some mechanism linking the abstract space and the real-world commodity: You need to be able to take the nickel out of the warehouses (and get actual nickel) in order for the warehouse receipts to track the value of actual nickel, even if you rarely actually do it. ...which, technically and practically, a listed Canadian gold mining company coooould do.]
there's a wonderful little Epstein story in there, too.
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