(no subject)

suppose you discover the philosopher's stone, allowing you to turn base metals into gold and become very very wealthy (you're still working on getting the elixir of life FDA approved). assume, further, that there's very few practical limitations on how much gold you can make; you could outpace the current amount of gold mined per year by multiple orders of magnitude, if you cared to work out the logistics.

Now, obviously if you did this the price of gold would collapse. you don't care because by the time you've sold enough gold that it stops being profitable you're set for life (even accounting for your new immortality), plus have enough capital to get that FDA approval, but other people do. The world's gold mining companies come to you and say they'll pay you a huge amount of money if you agree to sensible caps on your gold transmutation per year.

1) setting aside whether that's good business sense, can you legally sign that contract or would that run afoul of anti-competitive agreement laws?

2) lots of people (and banks and governments) use gold as a store of value. how much financial damage would you be doing to the world by making the value of gold drop?

3) gold has industrial applications and isn't just valuable cause it's shiny and rare (it's a pretty good conductor and resistant to corrosion). how much damage to the world are you doing by not making electronics cheaper to make? how many more industrial applications would gold have in a world where it's as cheap as copper?

4) gold mining has horrible environmental consequences. how many people are you killing by not driving the mining companies immediately out of business?