I will apologise in advance and explain that this is a little long but it is important information (break it up and read it in bits if you wish) and there is, by necessity, more to come after.
I'm not going to try to convince you that I know everything that is going on behind the scenes at Karatbars because, of course, I do not. However, I am going to share what I can about what I know right now because what is coming is nothing short of mind blowing.
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I do not get an invite to the board meetings or have a regular daily or even weekly phone chat with Harald Seiz. But I do know a lot more about the Karatbars business than a very large number of people who openly comment on this business online in Facebook and so on without knowing anything or next to nothing at all. And without any regard to FACT over rumour.
A surprisingly large number of them aren't even Karatbars members and yet they feel justified to comment. Let's go through some quick examples of what I have seen/heard:
They are running an illegal business and were banned in Canada
They ran into difficulty with Canadian regulators back in 2014 because of poor practices by an affiliate who failed to comply with the Karatbars compliance rules. They resolved the problem and fought a legal battle to get their name cleared and to get off the Autorité Des Marchés Financiers (AMF) warning list. This was successful and they legitimately and very successfully operate in Canada now as a result. That can all be checked if you look in the right places.
More importantly, they have an enormous presence in Canada. The same sites that slammed this all over the web still haven't retracted or updated even now. Everywhere this was reported all comes back to the one site that started this all off in 2014. And that was copied and used as if it were original. If anyone tells you that Karatbars are illegal in Canada, understand that they have used old information from a very poor (designed to shock) website that simply isn't true and hasn't been for several years.
They do not really own any gold mines.
Total nonsense, they absolutely do. More specifically, they own shares in and rights to more than one gold mine. You don't need to own a gold mine outright (as in freehold) to acquire rights to the gold in the ground. You'd have to be a very brave and a very specialist business indeed to buy the patch of dirt the mine sits on and then take all the risks of hiring, security, digging and sorting from scratch. Oil Wells operating in the North Sea do not own the North Sea but they have acquired the right to drill there. A company can own a share of the gold that comes out of the ground now and in the future without owning the land.
Owning the land on which the mine operates is the hard way to do it. You can just invest money in them for rights and shares instead, that's the easy way to do it. But only, of course, if you are a well funded and stable company. Karatbars are. And the gold in the ground is, of course, collateral. Collateral and rights to the gold is more than enough to do what they need to do in the future. It buys guarantees from banks. Governments and Central banks own plenty of gold. Do you think they own the mines it comes out of?
They aren't really making a voice over blockchain smartphone.
Again, total nonsense. Cryptodata (who developed the technology) is a real company (built by Ovidiu Toma who is now the Chief Technical Officer for the entire group) and Karatbars, through the Gold Standard Banking Group, own Cryptodata. The phone is being made as we read this. 25,000 units have already been made and will be shipped as soon as it is right to do so. Some should even be getting to Karatbars headquarters prior to the Amsterdam Conference on 15th September.
Of course, there is a problem that has sprung up recently that is completely outside of their control (before the inevitable shit storm hits about that as well) but it should be temporary. Watch the news and you will see that Hong Kong is a mess currently because of all the riots. That's where our phones are coming from so to say we could not be affected by that might be foolish.
But the phones are real and are going to be usable and with us soon. They are also unique. But they will get copied, that's a dead cert, so the company have anticipated that and made the technology open-source meaning that, when they are copied, they will still use our blockchain and generate fees for us. We will have the first mover advantage but keep action on everything that happens thereafter.
Want to research a good example of that happening before? Check out Bitcoin. The bitcoin protocol has always been open-source and remains so even today. Bitcoin's biggest asset is that, in Crypto World, it has the largest number of actual users. Karatbars aim to have the most widely used blockchain for voice over blockchain technology.
Another great thing about the Karatbars blockchain (Mainnet) is you can build other apps and programs on it and the open-source nature will encourage others to do just that. All equals usage fees and transaction charges. Just like apps on Apple and Android.
The phone does not really have satellite capability.
It does, but the use of satellite phones is illegal in some countries. So that function will not be rolled out everywhere immediately so that they risk falling foul of any countries that take a dim view of them. There will be an accessory that will be made available for satellite use where such use is possible and that will come as soon after launch as is possible and sensible.
The 100 KBC to gold promise isn't real.
It absolutely is. I personally picked up 10 grams of Cashgold while I was in Stuttgart. I exchanged 10 QR codes that I got from converting 10 bonus univals (BUNV) per day for ten days on Karatbit. I was able to do this conversion because I carried out the platinum KYC steps as requested on Karatbit. Many of their customers have not even carried out the basic bronze level KYC and are wondering why they can't do this. There is an image below, a simple picture I took myself of my resulting Cashgold.
I have had people complaining about the need to do that KYC. Guess what, those extra security steps are being implemented so that you do not become the next person to have their KBC coins stolen. Please don't join that list of people.
The 10 grams of gold I picked up cost me 1000 KBC coins. Those coins cost me 6 Euros. How much do you think a gram of 24 karat gold is worth? Forgetting actual live market price which will, in time, increase, I already know (because I have asked) what I would get on the spot from a gold trader - a minimum of £37 per gram without even removing the gold element - so £370 pounds (that's €407). That's as real as it gets. | 
