Remember when the Winklevoss Twins were discussing Bitcoin with Dave Portnoy? It was considered by many as not helping Bitcoin for some of the arguments made by the twins to select Bitcoin instead of investment in gold.
"If [Elon Musk] mines all the gold on the asteroids, all of a sudden gold is worthless, and I think he will."
"There’s billions of dollars of gold floating in asteroids around this planet,"
These are quotes coming from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Nobody ever believed that this is an actual argument to support the case of Bitcoin versus Gold. It was an argument that even the Bitcoin proponents did not take into consideration.
The Winklevoss twins kept going though.
"Elon Musk is going to destroy gold. He's going to get up there and start mining gold. That’s why gold is a problem, because the supply isn’t fixed like bitcoin. Gold is for boomers who don't understand that."
If you haven't seen the whole conversation already, do it now, there is a lot being discussed that makes it worth the 15 minutes it lasts.
Asteroid mining is not out of reach for humanity. The Winklevoss don't discuss short-term here, they are pioneers and very well educated. They are not Bitcoin maximalists either, and they see the big potential in the whole cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin for many is treated as an onboarding mechanism for adoption of other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is where everyone goes first but there is so much innovation and value in the intelligent systems of other crypto that nobody should be missing.
The market can be fragmented in different categories like this:
Digital Store of Value assets
Digital Payment Systems and Digital Cash assets (Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dash)
Platforms (Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, Tron)
Business Oriented Blockchain Innovations (Dragonchain, aelf, Vechain)
Decentralized Finance Projects
Art, entertainment (NFTs, Blockchain games, etc.)
Basically, the market will have different sections sooner or later, and while some projects can apply to many sections, there will be many that will specialize in a certain sector and boost development in it, gaining expertise and experience in the process to be more competitive.
Bitcoin will not be everything as it still is, and the prices of other crypto assets will eventually stop following Bitcoin movements. The innovation is exceptional in the crypto space and Bitcoin will stop dominating in the next few years. The dominance levels we see this year will not be seen later. I expect Bitcoin's dominance to be less than 10% in 2023 with all this progress and innovation we are enjoying.
Back to the asteroid mining.
This is the Psyche 16 asteroid. It was discovered in the midst of the 19th century by Annibale de Gasparis, an Italian astronomer.
This space rock has a diameter of 250 km, and it is one of the largest asteroids in the main zone of our solar system. Recent observations of this asteroid have shown that it contains colossal mineral wealth. It contains huge amounts of gold, platinum, nickel, and iron, even on the surface.
Psyche 16 is just one out of hundreds of asteroids being identified as mineral rich space rocks inside the solar system. As a result, a space digger movement has begun seeking the new Klondike and may result in a sci-fi Gold Rush perhaps even inside this century.
This is not a joke anymore. Space mining is no longer science fiction either. Space mining research is now backed by governments, as we read about Luxembourg which is the financial hub of the Europian Union, investing in this.
The space mining industry is already attracting investments of two billion dollars a year. The technology is not far from achieving this and many believe that asteroid mining will be reality inside the 21st century.
However, the price of gold will be safe for a while and perhaps Bitcoin will have managed to reach a status of digital gold, without gold first losing scarcity. The Winklevoss argument is one that great visionaries are making, and often misunderstood. It was put in a way that a common person wouldn't understand. The Winklevoss as most visionaries have the distant future in mind. This is why they invested in Bitcoin early and as visionaries they didn't just held the Bitcoin without producing something. They kept building, created Gemini and will fund anything they see as being visionary.
In fact, I am certain they would fund even an idea written in a piece of paper if it matches their perspective of the future of our race. Some people are enjoying dealing with small things like short term profits, percentages of taking profits and stock markets. Some people are thinking far more than that and these are the ones that are shaping the future of human kind.
