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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

No they won't. Even if you get as big as this one the article is talking about to be full of gold and drop it directly in backyard of a gold smelting factory it will barely make a dent in the price of gold. Plus our entire technology is based on using silver and gold for circuitry, so it will get absorbed really fast in the market. Currently we have so much of a shortage that we recycle old boards to extract the metals in them.

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All of the gold that has ever been mined by humanity over the last few thousand years would fit in a cube about 21 meters per edge. So I think that actually it would make a big difference to grab something this size made out of gold.

https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...

I wonder what the best way to sell that would be? Maybe just slowly release it and use the asset as security on loans. That way you maintain the high price and get access to capital.

Depends on whether you keep it private.

If people know it's going to be released, it doesn't make too much of a difference exactly how long you are going to take.

(Unless you go really, really slow.)

> Even if you get as big as this one the article is talking about to be full of gold and drop it directly in backyard of a gold smelting factory it will barely make a dent in the price of gold.

I'm not so sure: The price of gold depends on an estimate of future supply. If a company can successfully mine an asteroid for 5 grams of gold in 2025, many people will be worried about a massive increase in gold supply over the next 50 or 100 years. They would then dump their existing holdings of gold and crash the price.

The trick is to drop it by several gold smelting factories, so one one gets a monopoly.

In reality, some entity will get the first metal asteroid, and have a monopoly for a while. But only a while.

I don't understand your arguments for no price drop. To me the facts are simple: Price is set by supply and demand. When supply increases by 10x or 100x, prices will fall dramatically.

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