It wasn't completely gold plated on the bottom. I still kept one of each of these because they looked so cool, and I'll post a bottom pic of each of them later this afternoon. But the bottom of the gold ones had some extensive gold plating in various places, but not the whole thing. It was clearly a multi-layer board with gold on each layer because I cut one corner off one of the ones I sent in and it had gold on all the visible layers. Judging by that, I assume the silver one is the same way.