I just hope collectors will just stop buying your substantially overpriced and far too often, subpar products. (2017 silver nightmares...... extremely SUBPAR, milk spots anyone?) You’d think a seller gouging his/her buyers would make sure all their products were top notch. I mean even this bar is stamped with 999 and labeled 9999. Awesome quality control.
This does not reflect the reality at all. We have had significant improvements in quality control over the years. For example we invested around 10k€ recently to build a pressurized clean room for the product assembly and all the products are now assembled in an ultra clean environment. It's to minimize the amount of any type of debris in the products, to make sure they are as clean as possible.
Additionally the checks on product quality are stricter than ever before. For many products we set aside, to not sell, a significant portion of the product we actually have. This happens when there are even minor issues with the quality of a particular item.
We made these changes exactly because there had been issues with some earlier products. The 2017 silver coins were clearly the worst, and it was an issue with the mint. What we did was we pulled the product out from sale, stopped working with that particular mint, and we added a patinated finish on them and they are now on sale again with the patinated finish. Note we have changed the mints we use 5 or so times since 2015. Now we have I think finally found very solid partners to deliver high quality regardless of the material.
There have been no major issues with any of our gold plated brass or copper coins, any of the gold products, and the bull silver/bronze coins of 2016. The first 2015 brass coins (without gold plating) were pretty bad, some of them. And the 2017 silver was a disaster. But we have quickly reacted to these issues and made sure the same issue doesn't repeat and that the quality improves. And it certainly has, quite significantly. We look at each and every feedback our customers give and have reacted based on that.
We are not doing this stuff as a volume factory, it's a really careful process in all stages. Especially nowadays.
And the issue with the .999 / .9999 gold purity is not really a quality control issue. We use the most reputable lab in Finland for this sort of thing and they simply don't have the .9999 stamp. But as I have explained before we get a certificate that shows the actual purity which is .9999 in this case, and we can provide that to any customers if needed. We have considered using a lab outside Finland but so far we have felt it increases the logistics issues quite a bit when handling major gold shipments. As the lab obviously gets all the gold and then randomly tests some of it.
Overall I'm fairly sure our production process is at the moment more sophisticated than most (if not all) other physical bitcoin producers that have ever existed.
This has some side effects though, as sometimes getting a particular product out (like this 10-year anniversary bar) can take quite a while as we've become more and more strict on the quality standards of everything. This was supposed to be launched approximately 6 months ago and we've had the bars for quite a while, but we worked on getting the packaging just right for multiple months. But I think the end result is worth it.