Asteroid more value of precious metals worth $10kquad than the entire world

[rdbase]

Came across this fascinating article about how an asteroid which has $10,000 quadrillion value of precious metals is worth more than the entire world economy which includes bitcoin (for now).
Elon Musk is getting his rocket ready to start real time mining on that rock for certain!





Thought I would share this little tidbit with the cryptocurrency community since its inregards to being an addition to an economy of the sorts in the near future.

[dothebeats]

There are tons of similar asteroids out there that are yet to be discovered. And imagine if we do have the technology to do a large-scale harvesting of these resources: we wouldn't be needing to mine on earth to get precious metals for our needs. All of our mining efforts will be geared towards space, and that is the time when our civilization would begin to be a spacefaring species, albeit on a limited scale.

Necessity is the mother of all inventions, and when the time comes that we need those precious metals that are freely flying around, we will be able to create the tech that will allow us to harvest those.

[suchmoon]

One thing that always gets lost in this exciting news is that if such an asteroid is mined for profit (especially in a competitive non-OPEC way) then the values of those materials would likely drop significantly to some equilibrium value where it's barely profitable and it would likely no longer be worth quadrillions. If you're holding precious metals like gold you better hope a golden asteroid is never mined. But iron and nickel - fair game. Or cobalt or lithium or other shit that's very difficult to mine on earth.

[hatshepsut93]

This is cool, but I don't think anyone should base any sort of decisions on the fact that there are such asteroids. We're hundreds of years, if not thousands, from making such things economically viable, so just like the end of Bitcoin's block rewards, this will only concern future generations. In theory this is a good argument for Bitcoin, but on practice you should think about the present and close future first and foremost.

[redsun114]

It doesn't make sense to calculate it this way because if you could bring all of that here, which would be an impossible task to begin with but let's assume you found a way to get there, you managed to change the course of it, slow it down and make it a "moon" of earth so it revolves around us until we pick it to pieces and get everything valuable there and then send it on it is way without hurting any other place, so that we could basically have all these riches? After such an impossible and unlikely situation, we are talking about world having so much of these valuable expensive things, and when you have abundant amount of these things, the prices of them would fall.

Let's assume you put 1 million tons of gold on earth today, do you really think gold would stay the same? Or you printed 20 more millions of bitcoins today, would bitcoin stay the same? Whenever there is more of something, the price of it would fall for sure.

[figmentofmyass]

This is cool, but I don't think anyone should base any sort of decisions on the fact that there are such asteroids. We're hundreds of years, if not thousands, from making such things economically viable, so just like the end of Bitcoin's block rewards, this will only concern future generations.

+1. if/when significant technological breakthroughs are made, and more importantly when those precious metals begin to hit to market, the market will price it in. i wouldn't be trying to speculate generations or hundreds of years out---that's a crap shoot. the markets won't be doing that. gold just hit a new ATH last year.

i still think bitcoin will take a big bite out of gold's share of the SOV market. i'm just not basing that opinion on the prospect of asteroid mining.

[speedforce]

Let's assume you put 1 million tons of gold on earth today, do you really think gold would stay the same? Or you printed 20 more millions of bitcoins today, would bitcoin stay the same? Whenever there is more of something, the price of it would fall for sure.

Yes its true, its like diamond manipulation price. Actually diamond is not rare thing, but many miner banded together and decided to only release diamonds in smaller batches so the price keep high. I think it will do same with this asteroid thing, the miner(i think only a few which can mine this) will decided only release the asteroids in small batches to keep the price high. Its how the world works dude, enjoy it.

Reference : https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-diamonds-are-so-expensive-2015-9?r=US&IR=T

[Obito]

There are tons of similar asteroids out there that are yet to be discovered. And imagine if we do have the technology to do a large-scale harvesting of these resources: we wouldn't be needing to mine on earth to get precious metals for our needs. All of our mining efforts will be geared towards space, and that is the time when our civilization would begin to be a spacefaring species, albeit on a limited scale.

Necessity is the mother of all inventions, and when the time comes that we need those precious metals that are freely flying around, we will be able to create the tech that will allow us to harvest those.

There are a lot of hurdles that we have to get to before we can safely mine an asteroid and even make it viable. We need an efficient cost for space flight and we need some stop overs that will make that trip less expensive than it is. We do not need to discover this asteroid, almost all those asteroid have almost the same component. We are testing prototypes that can do the mining but we are still far from doing it because of the current cost of space flight.

[kolesozw]

Imagine what will happen with the gold price if somebody finds a million tones reserves today?
If anyone finds a way to exploit the asteroid profitably, the metals there will lose their value in no time - the simple math of demand and supply.

[adaseb]

I heard about this when that Dave Portnoy guy went to see the Winklovoss Twins when he got involved with Bitcoin last year. They were explaining how Elon Musk can build some rocket to get these astroids full of Gold. It was their motivation to get Dave Portnoy to invest in BTC because its supply is capped at 21M instead of Gold which has infinite supply due to these astroids.

The problem I see with this is the cost involved to get some rocket up to the astroid and be able to extract the metals. I think the cost to extract the metals will be higher than the value of the metals that they bring back to Earth. Maybe if this astroid crashed onto Earth somehow then I would say the price of Gold would crash since its supply would be much larger however I don't think that will happen anytime soon.

[Hawaii2020]

Very interesting. I long think Gold and Silver are just bubbles. Many old people still believe they have a value since they grow up with USD-Gold parity which is long gone. And for silver just 5% of the market is actually using silver for real world things.

[rdbase]

Musk will discover Asteroid but metals value will not be free. a lot of resources needed to send a probe to that planet, do mining and return to Earth. It requires money and investment, and many companies will try to implement the same ideas.
Humans will continue to struggle for resources even if they are over the stars, and this conflict is what earns them value.

I think he is more interested in making bitcoin the currency of earth and maybe have put it aside to explore this asteroid for now.
From the most recent events he seems to be fully vested in his next capital venture.
Make BTC moon before going to this rock in space looking for more precious metals.