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CCC comments on Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk? - LessWrong
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Hmmm, looking at the citation brings me to this page...
It seems that, as you point out, that value entirely fails to take into account the severe drop in price caused by the vast amount of metal suddenly on the market...
If all of those asteroids are owned by one company, then they can sell the metal of the asteroids for as much as it was before because they would be the only people with that much metal, having something similar to a monopoly. They would have the choice of lowering the value of the metals, because if they only made $10/ton. of metal and they sold 1 million tons, then they make ten million dollars. However, if a different company with ten tons of metal making $10/ton. of metal would make one hundred dollars, perhaps not be able to pay their workers, and go out of business. That would reduce competition for the company that caught the asteroid. However, if the company sold them for the same prices long-term they could make trillions of dollars.
Yeah, but in order to pull that off, they need to dribble the metal slowly enough into the market. Considering that they have significant up-front costs in getting the stuff, and furthermore considering that they have to deal with an economics phenomenon called the time value of money (basically, $100 now is worth more than $100 next year because if you have it now you can earn interest on it for a year), dribbling it into the market like that might just mean that they can never quite recover the value of their initial investment.