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Yes, there's a dumb amount of precious metals up there. If you were to bring back the contents of a single asteroid you'd crash the market. Here's a master's th

• bsder 7y ago
  Yeah, but if you look at that paper, platinum is extracted at roughly $20,000,000 per tonne--roughly the price of a single rocket launch right now. And we extract only 200 tons per year. That's a $20 billion market, but it's so sensitive to supply that nobody is rushing to open more mines.
• mikhailfranco 7y ago
  Presumably, any public or insider information about a credible funded technologically-sound attempt to mine the asteroid would crash the market first. So, the first sign of such an attempt would be huge shorts in the paper commodity markets by the people funding the mission. They would have to make their money on the financial hedging, not on the actual sale of mined PMs. Perhaps it also means that Bitcoin has a more credible claim to a limited future supply than traditional PMs with a "proven 5,000 year track record".