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Comment by mac01021 | Hacker News Reader

Right now the world's entire mineral supply is worth X dollars.

If I acquire a bunch of asteroids and double the size of that supply, I now own X/2 dollars worth of minerals, instead of the zero dollars worth that I did before.

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Maybe not. If the worldwide demand is N tons and the worldwide supply is estimated at 0.75 * N, then doubling the supply to 1.5 * N is likely to reduce the unit price by more than half.

For a simple example, consider the case of decorative diamonds today.

Price of diamonds is artificial, what is the problem with controlling supply of space minerals?

Diamonds aren’t a good example since their price is build on artificial scarcity and marketing. Dare I call this a straw man?

I think it’s an excellent example and the artificial scarcity is irrelevant to the point being made: total market value of all $substance is not constant when quantity of $substance changes.

The formal term for how the price of something changes when the supply changes is the elasticity of demand. Well, really that's the term for how the amount people buy changes with the price but if we assume the person with the asteroid lowers the price enough to sell all the metal it comes to the same thing. It's known to be different for different sorts of goods and different circumstances. For instance platinum is mostly used in catalytic converters and people don't tend to make more or less of those as platinum prices change so the price would probably go down quite a bit as more supply becomes available. I got that by googling "price elasticity platinum" and you can do the same for the other asteroid components you might want to sell.

As a dwarf fortress player I support this ≡message≡ about the use of decorative diamonds.

I think that if you were to make something like platinum group metals more easily accessible/cheaper, then there would be a lot more uses for them discovered as well. So while you would reduce the price for them massively, I think you could potentially create more demand for them.

It is not 0 dollars to get the asteroid.

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