A jackpot flies in space, which breaks any ideas about market capitalization. Forget about trillions of the stock market or the capitalization of the entire crypto space - meet, 16 Psyche (16 Psyche).
This is a giant metal asteroid located in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. Unlike most rock or ice asteroids, Psyche consists almost entirely of iron, nickel, and also contains huge reserves of gold and platinum.
Let's look at the numbers:
Estimated value of metals: ~$700 quintillion ($700,000,000,000,000,000,000).
Share per person: If you divide this amount by all 8 billion inhabitants of the Earth, each of us would receive about $93 billion.
Does it sound like a dream? And now we turn on the basic economy đ
If some Elon Musk miraculously delivered all this metal to Earth tomorrow, we wouldn't suddenly become rich. There would be a collapse of commodity markets.
The main rule of economics: the price is determined by the balance of supply and demand. If gold the size of a small moon is suddenly dumped on the market, it will instantly depreciate. Gold, platinum and other rare metals would cost less than aluminum cans, as their supply would become almost endless.
đĄ Lesson for investors: This space story is a perfect illustration of why scarcity is crucial to preserving value. It is this principle that is the basis of the same Bitcoin (BTC) with its rigid limit of 21 million coins. No asteroid will be able to increase bitcoin emission.
Why does NASA fly there?
The Psyche probe was successfully launched in the fall of 2023 and will arrive at the asteroid in 2029. But NASA doesn't fly there for gold. Scientists believe that Psyche is the naked metal core of an ancient planet that collapsed billions of years ago. Studying the asteroid will help to understand how the core of our own Earth is arranged. There are no space drilling rigs on board... yet.