Its been done and failed because the company is not interested in digging in rock for gold to sell for funds. They did just fine getting their funding from the crowd of bag holders.
And again..... NEVER gonna happen.
PL needs $2M in cash to pay the VCs so he can begin a new death spiral. Without it there is only death at the bottom of the current spiral.
Do you really think CL Best left miles of nuggets just laying around ... the guy owned Caterpillar and thus had unlimited access to the best heavy equipment on the planet... anyone who spends even just an hour going thru Cliftons presentation can see the big Ruby nuggets only occurred in a small region that was for lack of a better word "cleaned out".
A mining company is just a black hole that voraciously consumes more money than it produces ... unless the company has great mining managers and good ground.