It will be interesting to see how this plays out. On one hand, a single country can't just flood the market with a valuable material. But at the same time it can't hoard it indefinitely, as other countries will want a piece of the pie.
Can you elaborate? A few centuries ago Spain extracted so much silver and gold from the American continent that the price of those precious metals suffered in consequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology)
That story foreshadows the way many think the UK economy was saved in the 1980s by the discovery of oil in the North Sea. (As opposed to Margaret Thatcher.)
Why not? Seems like the start of the path to post-scarcity civilization. Once nothing has value and everyone has everything I'd say that's a win.
Because then it loses value.
Think of it as if a publicly traded company just issued bajillions of shares onto the market. This is what dilution is, and the price of each individual share plummets, thus screwing over all existing shareholders. Normally, dilution is limited, but with this, i would be like issuing many times more shares than already exist on the market.
If you have more gold than everyone on earth and you flood the market people can use it for any numerous uses that help humanity instead of making people rich.
Science research is often hurt by the fact that materials like gold and diamonds have such high prices.
More platinum group metals and gold might not make a big difference on Earth.
On the other hand decadbonization requires metals like nickel and cobalt as well as methods for producing steel that don’t release CO2 in the atmosphere. Trouble is it is still hard to be terrestrial sources.