Most people think that their currency will fail one day or another and historically they are right.
Every currency eventually fails. There have been not hundreds but rather tens of thousands of failed currencies throughout human history and each one has failed to retain purchasing power over a long period of time. Most go to zero or are well on their way. Even most cryptocurrencies, with all their pomp and fanfare, have already failed as others surge in popularity before plummeting back to their intrinsic value.
Likewise, gold standards have come and gone, one failing after another. In theory a gold standard should work since gold has retained value for thousands of years. What happens is that the failure is generally from within. It only takes one generation of less than perfectly honest people to destroy a gold standard.
Having worked on top of millions of dollars in gold myself I imagine that the conversation goes somewhat like this; "You know... we have all these costs and if we had a 99% ratio instead of 100% ratio then would anyone notice? I mean, we only have about 1% of this stuff leaving in a given year..." Once the first dishonest step is taken it is very hard to not take another. What is so sacred about 99% after all? Why not 98%? or 55%? Then it is a race to the bottom.
The U.S. fiat dollar has lost most of it's value since 1971 and continues to lose value to this day.
Word eventually gets out that the gold may not really all be there and that is when the bank run starts. This happened during the 1960s when France began pulling her gold from the United States. The problem was so dire that the President ended redemptions of gold for dollars. This is the death of nearly all gold standards throughout history. The lack of true accountability makes corruption easy, maybe inevitable if history has anything to say.
At UPMA we like to think of ourselves as Saints and indeed, we may be but what about the next generation of managers? The one after? When building Quintric we came up with a solution that we believe will finally end the accountability problem. This solution did not exist for 99.99% of human history and to our knowledge we are the first people to ever implement it. We are going to live-stream the vault online so it can be easily compared to a blockchain.
Gold is only as secure as the system in place to manage it.
The Quint blockchain keeps track of how much gold there should be. The live-stream allows anyone whether they use Quint or not to see just how much is in the vault vs. said blockchain. The numbers should be very close, it won't be perfect due to shipping times and whatnot but it will be very very close. We may even pull out a random coin and burn it on a live camera to prove that it isn't tungsten filled. Each box will be loaded on camera. We will have a bounty if anyone anywhere can find a box that doesn't have exactly what we say it does. Raw footage will be archived forever.
Quintric is looking to change the world of money. Anyone vaulting from here on out will have to answer for why they aren't live-streaming too. Why is their gold a secret? They may site security reasons. This is a valid concern. In order to address this ourselves we are only live-streaming the portion of the vault holding Quint tokens and then it will be on a delay so would be crooks wouldn't know when the door is open or pick up on reliable patterns. There aren't many other obstacles unless you have something to hide. We don't, we just want credit for being honest and we want to keep it that way for long after everyone alive today is dead and buried. In this way we can fix our money and change the world.