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Comment by chucksmash | Hacker News Reader

Back before there were so many hecto-billionaires (fifteen now, according to Forbes), I remember seeing a throwaway quote somewhere to the effect that the first trillionaire would be the first person to economically mine asteroids.

It made me wonder, because it seems like even if someone had easy access to $100 trillion worth of platinum, they would no longer have $100 trillion worth of platinum. How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?

It's also mildly entertaining to consider that while the quote I mentioned was intended to express the idea that asteroid mining would make someone a trillionaire, it might have been prophetic yet gotten things exactly backwards. With Bezos and Musk both having space programs, it seems plausible that compound interest could bring us to a future where the first trillionaire becomes the first asteroid miner instead of the other way around.

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> How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?

If you're just selling the minerals that might be the case. If you also have a vertically integrated company that produces things that use a lot of minerals (batteries), you might just be able to use all these things yourself, and sell them for more than the base cost of the material.

> How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?

The same way that DeBeers did.

Plus, you could also buy up the manufacturers that actually use this. Platinum price drops, but you're also benefitting from getting it at-cost as you literally drop-ship it to your factory producing catalytic converters and microchips.

Sure you can do that, but the desire for catalytic converters is pretty static. They aren't a luxury good like diamond jewelry. You don't have the option of making them scarce and desirable.

We will make every woman want one

> It made me wonder, because it seems like even if someone had easy access to $100 trillion worth of platinum, they would no longer have $100 trillion worth of platinum. How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?

You can't (for practical reasons) instantly drop all of it on the market at once. As you increase production, terrestrial mines may decide to shut down based on price fluxations or increases in difficulty of mining the last remaining deposits. World governments might prefer to keep terrestrial mines as reserves for national security reasons and import space sourced materials when economically feasible.

Short the commodity market before your plans become known. Essentially selling the new metal at the old price. Your profit then depends on the depth of the futures market at various terms in the future.

Secondly, don't bring the resource back to Earth. Take it to the Moon, Mars, or orbital manufacturing facilities, to be used in further space exploration/colonization.

I went through that thought exercise a few years ago, and decided the metals might end up worth more as weapons.

If you maneuver a big asteroid into Earth orbit, you can always just drop chunks of it on the heads of people you don’t like. Basically “rods from God”, but using mass that’s already in space. I wrote a book using that as the premise.

If this is the case why didn't the colonization of the new world destroy the European economies forever?

Platinum prices going to zero wouldn't destroy the economy, just platinum mines.

The estimate I've seen for the total amount of gold humans have ever dug up is an approximately 20m³ cube. Wiki says gold has a density of 19.283 g/cm³. If I'm doing my math right, that means we've dug up 154,264,000 kg of gold. If you value that at the current price of $85,000/kg, we've got $13 trillion of gold.

Compare that with the guesses they were making about the "value" of a single metallic asteroid, 16 Psyche, of $10 quintillion[0]. Coming into contact with the New World let pre-industrial civilizations 2x or 3x the resources they could access, while the boost from asteroid mining could give us six or more orders of magnitude. That 20m³ could be collected and put in a museum.

[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche...

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