
What's the most profitable use for an elemental transmuter? - personjerry
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/158669
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Causality1
Corner the market on rare earths. Alternatively, hold a nation hostage by
threatening to transmute one of their mountain ranges into something
unpleasant like astatine.

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simonblack
The rare earths are expensive because they are rare or hard to extract.

Make them the same price as (say) water and they become very, very cheap. The
same thing applies to gold, or uranium, or platinum.

What we require as an end product is something that the world requires
millions of tons of but is still quite expensive today.

I nominate copper as our most profitable end-product.

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Causality1
I'd love a writeup on this topic by an economist, or maybe a What If? article
from Randall Munroe. If you can use it to transform and create complex
molecules I imagine the market for refined petroleum products dwarfs that for
metals. But suppose you can only transform one element to another. You'd have
to take into account the expense of obtaining a large supply of a pure
element. By mass I would guess pure carbon is the cheapest element.

