foodforthoughts

Call gold buyers/jewelry stores in the yellow pages until you find the one with the best offer. If you are a licensed metals dealer you can find buyers that will pay around 95-98% of the spot price for karat gold. The general public has to get offered something less.

A business with an xrf machine can get an immediate non-destructive assay, so they will know exactly what your material is worth.

Have you heard about the Mondragon Cooperative? It is a very interesting phenomenon, a form of decentralized ownership and control where almost a hundred thousand people run a fairly large complex of cooperatives that is one of the ten largest companies in Spain. There is a new documentary coming out that was funded through kickstarter that covers cooperatives as well as Mondragon, it's called Shift Change The structure of Mondragon is a very libertarian solution to centralizing economic organization, and it helps distribute the information needed to coordinate advanced economic activity to a wide base of decision makers/participants.

I first read about Mondragon from Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, which I highly recommend for an overview of the cooperative.