(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

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?

Comments

[yvannairie]

IANAL but number 1 seems like a clear-cut case, since it's literally what happened with lightbulbs and that was apparently entirely legal, and number 2 is also kind of a foregone conclusion because even the governments that still keep to a standard have moved off of gold mostly because it's necessary for electronic applications.

And also I would be so jazzed to literally completely ruin the market value of gold and make literally every gold mine obsolete overnight, with an added bonus of going to the countries worst damaged by gold recycling and mining operations and being like "hello would you like control over the world's gold economy?" because while I don't trusts government, it would be a great fuck-you to former colonial powers to completely turn the tables in some small way.

But I wonder -- if the original limitation of "needing lead to make gold out of" applies, wouldn't the scarcity problem just get transferred over to lead, ballooning its cost?