1. It's not a modern business plan to follow veins using jackhammers anymore.

2. Grades being mined in the old days were a lot higher than what we mine today, or what we even discover anymore.

3. Most importantly, nobody with a stated business plan of "we'll just follow the veins using jackhammers and make it up as we go along" will ever get financed.

They still do mine this way in some parts of the world, like Latin America for example. That's what's referred to as "artisanal mining": guys just going up into the hills with a pick and shovel, looking for promising rocks, and starting a tunnel. But they don't get financed by banks, nor do they usually sell shares on the Venture exchange.

Visible gold does prove there's gold, obviously, because it's visible. But that's a moot point. You don't care that there's gold there, you care about whether there's enough gold to run a mine there.