Your intuition is wrong. Valuable resources are abundant in asteroids for one simple reason: gold and other industrially useful metals heavier than iron sink in magma. When the earth formed, they sank to the core.

Indeed what gold and other rare(-ish) metals we mine today are largely the remains of asteroid impacts which deposited metals into the crust of this planet after formation, then got mixed around by plate tectonics and water cycles. Go to the source and you’ll fine pure, reduced metals at the original concentrations.

Like for example, there are near earth asteroids classified as “non-metal” types that are 1-4% gold and platinum group metals by weight, which would totally make them valuable ores on Earth. Let me emphasize these are the non-metal asteroids.

if gold becomes common, it's value drops, as it has no inherent uses (other than as decoration, and minor electrical/industrial uses, for which there is plenty here on earth already). Ditto with platinum - 'cept may be more valuable than gold for use as catalysts in industry.

I would imagine that asteroids would hold value with rare-earths instead of currency metals.

> as it has no inherent uses (other than as decoration, and minor electrical/industrial uses, for which there is plenty here on earth already)

This is extremely wrong. Gold is the preferred material for a huge variety of industrial applications, it's just not used because it's too expensive.

Silver and platinum are probably even bigger industrial wins though. Platinum is used a lot in industrial chemical reactors, and silver would entirely replace copper in electronics and heat-sinks if it were cheaper.

I think you severely underestimate the usefulness of gold in electronics.

You're ignoring the problem. The electronics industry would love it if they could gold plate every single PCB but for that to happen the price of gold would have to drop. Gold mining is probably only profitable at current gold prices so the electronics industry won't benefit from expensive space gold.

> Gold mining is probably only profitable at current gold prices

There is no reason to make this assumption.

The real value proposition of asteroid mining is the ability to source heavy things (metals, ice) from outside the gravity well, so that you don't have to lift them up. Manufacturing things is space is a pretty important thing in the tech skill-tree.

Yeah this space tourism needs infrastructure and shipping stuff from earth is expensive. So mining water and fertilizers(phosphorous) might be profitable surprising fast.

Not an expert but here is an article on turning lead into gold. Spoiler it's radioactive.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

For the energy cost, you might as well mine bitcoin instead of trying to make gold via nuclear reactions.

Cost is more of a spoiler than radioactivity. At "one quadrillion dollars per ounce" you might as well do isotope separation and only collect stable gold 197. The additional cost of the separation would probably be just a rounding error in the whole thing.