• chunes@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      It would make gold cheaper and more abundant for sure. But that doesn’t really mean too much. Slightly cheaper electronics, much cheaper gold jewelry, and Trump can build an entire tower out of gold if he wants I guess. Gold is important, but suddenly having an order of magnitude more wouldn’t mean we’re all an order of magnitude better off.

      But really someone pointed out that only part of that asteroid is gold and the total value was calculated using the value of all the different metals in there. Iron (boring, it’s not THAT expensive as is), iridium (quite important for electronics), etc. If we managed to bring that whole asteroid into orbit and actually share the spoils equally between nations, a lot of different things would be slightly cheaper to manufacture. Not sure the effect would be too noticeable in the end though. We have a tendency to manufacture more shit than we need so cheaper materials would just facilitate that.