More likely - whichever billionaire mined it (well, funded the mining anyway) would hoard it off the market to keep the value high and make them richer.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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“The mine owners did not find the gold asteroid, they did not mine the gold asteroid, they did not mill the gold asteroid, but by some weird alchemy all the gold from the asteroid belonged to them!”
Bill Haywood
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It's funny that people think the wealth from asteroid mining will trickle down.
If anything, it seems like an opportunity for billionaires to have indentured servants who are stuck in outer space mining until their term is up. That’s probably some of the reason they have been investing so heavily in prisons.
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At least everything would be covered in gold then. Electronics would be cheaper too.
They'd be cheaper to make.
yeah, after impact, quite evenly. last time it happened, it was called iridium anomaly. there's not that much gold in electronics and other platinum group metals are more useful from material engineering perspective
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i suppose i could duck it, but is gold more conductive than copper or silver? i thought gold was used because it resists oxidation but not because of its conductivity.
No, that would make a few people incomprehensible wealthy while everyone else starved.
That's where we currently stand.
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Being rich isn't having wealth. It's keeping what has value away from anyone else.
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Everyone “being a billionaire” and having a huge pile of worthless metal won’t increase anyone’s standard of living to the same degree as nobody being a billionaire and nobody hoarding resources.
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The biggest value of this meteor is not gold it’s iridium and ironically it’s what we need to explore more other planets because iridium melting point is way higher. Also high precision electronics needs it
Not if I get to it first
And that's exactly what every billionaire is thinking.
enought to make everyone on earth billionaires
How very thoughtful. Hope the present billionaires dont accidentally hoard it.
Naw the new quintillionaires will let everyone have a bit. The biggest change will be adjusting to the new ten-thousand-dollar menu at mcdonalds
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Gold actually is worthless but humanity has decided it has value. Whats actually valuable is food, water, housing, mental peace, low stress, moral standards etc.
Gold is a actually extremely useful, and has a ton of practical applications where it's not used because of cost. Diamonds, which are supposedly abundant in asteroids, and quite plentiful on earth, on the other hand, can be manufactured in tool grade cheaply, and gem grade can be made for about $300/carat.
Yeah it’s super useful for semiconductors
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Gold is already worthless, main purpose of gold is that its shiny and pretty, less than 1% of gold mined gets used for electronics and stuff. The rest ist accessoires. The only reason gold costs something is because people think that it is worth something.
Gold does have practical value. It doesn't oxidize or tarnish at standard temperature and pressure, it is soft enough to beat into shape with a hammer and it can be rolled out incredibly thinly. If it were as common as iron, we would see it used everywhere. Gold sewer pipes, gold roofing, even gold foil to wrap your sandwich.
If I remember correctly, even its conductivity is higher than copper. Maybe in an alternative reality, we'd be using gold cables
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Hey, I'm game! Oversaturate the gold market and those at the top (including governments) would instantly be knocked down to regular people's level financially!
That being said, if this ever happened, there would be new laws and standards implemented immediately in order for nothing to change... The game is rigged. If the top 1% begin to lose, they just change the rules...
DON’T LOOK UP!
Yes, like everyone in Zimbabwe is a billionaire.
The so-called Zimbillionaires
Yeah like the influx of gold and silver from the Americas shook the European economy in the 17th century:
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So they agree the universe has abundant resources and the ultra wealthy on earth are just resource hoarders who don’t want to share those resources which directly causes poverty.
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But think of the gold cable connectors.
Monster Cable would have to find a new, useless luxury connection material. Platinum plated HDMI with carbon fiber strain relief boots.
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Making everyone on earth richer is how it's supposed to work. Not like millionaires, more in the sense that gold is a resource that requires us to ration it in a sense, and we would be able to use the cheaper gold to make all lives better.
That an influx of gold wouldn't do this is an indictment on our economic system.
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FWIW this isn't true, the $700 quintillion figure was an estimate of the total metal value (most of which would be iron) based on the asteroid being similar in composition to nickel-iron meteorites. As it happens we actually think it's a fair bit rockier than that these days. There'd still be vast amounts of metal there but it would be harder to mine and process with the extra rock.
Also the estimate was just multiplying the mass of each metal by its current market price, which isn't how any of this works anyway.
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