One of the most important numbers for any cryptocurrency is the total cap. The key to cryptocurrency being scarce lies in having an upper limit on the total amount issued. There are about sixteen million Bitcoins circulating but there is a potential for twenty one million bitcoins to ever exist. So how much Quint can be out there?
A very small portion of the gold in the world has been minted by the U.S Government.
Each Quint token equates to an ownership interest in 1/1000th of a U.S. minted 1oz gold coin. Gold is inherently scarce, and only a small portion of mined gold has ever been minted as coins, or what is often called Specie Legal Tender. In fact, only about twenty-five million American Gold Eagles (plus a few million of the newer Gold Buffaloes) have ever been minted. That is less than one thousand metric tonnes.
This means that if EVERY existing 1 oz U.S. minted gold coin were to be represented by Quint tokens, we would have around 30,000,000,000 Quint. Thus, that would be the theoretical cap, but realistically the majority of Quint are going to be based on the new mintage, because historically buyers of minted coins hold them privately for investment purposes, rather than as legal tender currency. The U.S. Mint produced about a million ounces of gold coin in 2016, so one might forecast the maximum theoretical creation of about a billion Quint for the coming years.
Yet existing demand for American Gold Eagle coins already consumes this volume. As Quintric demand grows, it is not known how much of that new demand can be accommodated by increased volume to be minted, versus shifting market share among the customer base through price increases. Clearly, increasing gold prices benefit prior purchasers, and some of the existing “coin inventory” may thus find its way back into circulation, which the Quintric system easily facilitates by making the value “spendable” via Quint tokens. On the other hand, the U.S. mint is legally required to create enough coins to meet public demand, so the long-term value of specie legal tender and their respective tokens is going to be influenced much more by global gold prices than by short-term scarcities or back-orders, thus making the Quintric platform much more stable than the more speculative, traditional cryptocurrencies.
Before getting into a cryptocurrency it is important to know how scarce it is. Gold is inherently scarce.
So what if Gold-based Quint tokens became the standard for all currency? How much gold is there really in the world anyway? Estimates for the total value of mined gold existing in the world at 2017 prices would produce a market cap for gold of about 7.7 trillion dollars, meaning that there are about five billion ounces out there including all the world's jewelry (46%) and central bank holdings (20%), which would equate--if all Gold were minted as specie legal tender--to about five trillion Quint. That is a decent number of one and zeros. Annual mining worldwide adds about one percent of new gold into the system.
For perspective, if all of the paper money in the world were added up (meaning just the physical government banknotes, coins, and funds considered to be on deposit in checking or savings accounts) one estimate put the total at about $36.8 trillion. Multiply that by about three if you broaden the definition to a range of cash equivalent instruments. In other words, if every paper dollar or cash equivalent in the world were backed by physical Gold (including jewelry), Gold prices would need to increase at least tenfold compared to the aptly named Fiat Currencies in order to find equilibrium.
Folks interested in signing up for the pre-sale and buying Quint tokens with cash can do so here:
More can be learned about Quintric here: