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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

I hear stuff like this a lot (mining asteroids for precious metals)...

Wouldn't flooding the market with that much gold...crash it? Are we really talking about that many billions and billions of dollars worth of potential revenue from mining an asteroid?

This all just seems like fun sci-fantasy.

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Wouldn't flooding the market with that much gold...crash it?

Well, presumably only a single party is going to recover that gold. If they dumped the whole load onto the market, it would crash. But if they release it slowly, then a greater supply from each batch would cause "inflation", so that the price they could get from the next batch would be lower. But they could still derive significant wealth before trailed off.

Seville in the 16th century is the best example of what might happen. Spain got hold of the equivalent of a gold-filled asteroid - South America. All the gold and silver came in through the port at Seville, which became very rich, and inflation slowly radiated out from there to the rest of Europe.

Presumably people would start using gold for all sorts of other things -- eg. replacing copper in wires -- so the market would also expand.

Would it sound less far-fetched if we talked about mining asteroids for rare-earth metals, conductive metals like copper, industrial metals like titanium, etc?

Gold is an industrial metal, though

Yes, but that has very little to do with its value on the exchange.

The sad part is that regardless of whether it's copper or gold, the economics of mining asteroids still doesn't work out.

Not yet. Give me a space elevator that gets me to geostationary orbit via electricity, and I think that statement could become untrue (assuming sufficient amount of ore and ease of extraction).

No, it just doesn't work out if you have a naive business model. Think a little bit and you'll find profitable ways to do it.

You could make the same arguement without any sci-fantasy. Why bother starting a new gold mine? If it doesn't have any gold then it's wasted effort, and if it has tons of gold then it will just depress prices. So why bother exploring for any resources anywhere?

Instead consider a big hunk of asteroid mined gold sitting in orbit. Free storage, and quick delivery to anywhere in the world. Park it up there and drop pieces of it when the prices are high enough.

The way you describe that perfrectly fots in with my idea that a 'caught' asteroid in orbit is worth more as a weapon system than as a gold mine. "Park it up there and drop pieces of it when you need some penetrating power"

Don't think "sell gold", think "make computers faster and cheaper."

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