4 ms·

> On one hand, a single country can't just flood the market with a valuable material. Why not? Seems like the start of the path to post-scarcity civilization.

• filoleg 3y ago
  > Why not? Because then it loses value. Think of it as if a publicly traded company just issued bajillions of shares onto the market. This is what dilution is, and the price of each individual share plummets, thus screwing over all existing shareholders. Normally, dilution is limited, but with this, i would be like issuing many times more shares than already exist on the market.
  • Larrikin 3y ago
    Shares in a company only have value because society assigns them value. If you hold them until the company no longer exists or go back in time before the company existed they are inherently worthless. If you have more gold than everyone on earth and you flood the market people can use it for any numerous uses that help humanity instead of making people rich. Science research is often hurt by the fact that materials like gold and diamonds have such high prices.
  • PaulHoule 3y ago
    It also depends on where the bottlenecks are. More platinum group metals and gold might not make a big difference on Earth. On the other hand decadbonization requires metals like nickel and cobalt as well as methods for producing steel that don’t release CO2 in the atmosphere. Trouble is it is still hard to be terrestrial sources.
  • bojo 3y ago
    I was trying to make a point about post-scarcity, but sure, let's continue to focus on capitalism I guess.