
The golden asteroid that could make everyone on Earth a billionaire - smn1234
https://www.rt.com/business/462703-golden-asteroid-everyone-billionaire/
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gus_massa
... assuming the price of gold does not fall to almost $0. Anyway, gold has a
lot of industrial applications, so it would be nice.

The annual mining of gold is about 3000 tons. In a very optimistic scenario,
let's assume a weekly rocket with 20 tons of gold, that increase the annual
production in 1000 tons. Probably enough to reduce the prize, but not to $0.

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Retra
If the gold is mixed or chemically bonded, you are delivering rock, and
there's plenty of gold in the rock beneath your feet, it is just not worth the
cost to extract. Surely requiring a high-risk rocket delivery system makes it
less feasible... perhaps so much that mining even a pure-gold asteroid would
not pay dividends.

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gus_massa
Gold mostly appear on Earth as a pure metal or an alloy with Silver (that is
also valuable), so I expect that in the asteroid it is in one of those forms.
(But I'm not an astrogeologist.)

Anyway, the article is probably too optimistic.

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jackfoxy
I think the real potential game changer here is platinum group metals. The
total world supply (of platinum alone) is a mere 8 million ounces
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/418212/global-
platinum-s...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/418212/global-platinum-
supply/) Investors long on platinum would not like it, but a significant
increase in supply would open economic activity using platinum group metals in
catalysts and other industrial uses.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/platinum-
ca...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/platinum-catalyst)

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rongenre
That's not how scarcity works.

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dragonwriter
No, it couldn't. What it could do is drop the value of gold so everyone on
Earth could afford as much gold (but not anything else) as present
billionaires.

It's not like modern currency is pegged to gold.

And exploiting the asteroid might make people billionaires, but would also
generate hyperinflation, if currency was pegged to gold.

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NikkiA
'could' is the key word here...

Much more likely to make a handful of people quadrillionaires and the rest of
us slightly more bitter.

