Illegal goldmining has been described as "the new cocaine" in LATAM It is how criminal organizations finance their activities and expansion It causes serious environmental crime It drives deforestation, poisons ecosystems (cadmium, chromium, arsenic, mercury and lead), endangers protected species, and scars indigenous lands UNEP estimate that illegal gold mining generates up to 48 billion in criminal proceeds annually Source: https://earth.org/the-environmental-impact-of-illegal-mining-in-latin-america/ And most of this gold sits in vaults, simply as a speculative asset. The worst thing about this? It's completely unnecessary. Gold only commands a high premium because of speculation. If it were no longer used as a speculative asset, its price would drop to its industrial usecase, and the economic incentive for this sort of environmental destruction would disappear. Now that we have Digital Gold, a technology that uses 0.0006% as much water, leaves no land scars, and obviates the need for the much more carbon-intensive gold industry, uses more sustainable energy than any other industry, and has been shown in multiple peer-reviewed studies to accelerate the green energy transition - there is no excuse for continuing to speculate on a legacy asset that is not only less portable, verifiable, storable, and divisible than its digital replacement, but also finances organized crime and environmental destruction at scale. The sooner we migrate to a clean green Bitcoin standard the better.