Frankly, it is a tough picture to tell exactly what it is. It looks like pyrite to me, and it looks like pyrite to Dunphy. I trust Dunphy - he has worked professionally in mines for a long, long time. And frankly I trust my judgment too over the average Ihub poster, when it comes to things geological......
Having said that, based on the crappy photos, it could be gold too, who knows. The chances are extremely slim, however. Visible gold that rich, would be an extraordinary find. I seriously doubt it is gold. I have seen a lot of gold mines and prospects, and have rarely, if ever, seen visible gold in a random chunk out of an open cut. Some mines, like the Congress Mine, produce very significant gold totals, without any visible gold ever being found.
And, one more thing, most pyrite in veins and along fractures does not show any particular crystalline structure - just a brassy colored vein filling, or a grainy structure. A crystal of pyrite, if you find one, is usually in the form of a simple cube, and octahedral crystals (also in the cubic crystal system) of pyrite are much rarer. It does not have to exhibit crystal faces, to be pyrite.
We can argue about whether a photo is showing gold or pyrite, but that's not the point here. The point is that Joel is promoting an old mining prospect, for which he has not even made the slightest effort to present any evidence of it having any mineral value. Not a single surface sample, not any drill holes, not a single assay, no geological map, no geological summary report, absolutely nothing!
For a scammer, he's just plain lazy, and yet it still works somehow? Amazing!
