You're missing the point. We know there are asteroids with price changing amounts of precious metals - we aren't mining them.
Commercialization involves so much more than proving it can be done physically. And it also involves more than meeting a price in a padded environment. There are hurdles to jump that are totally disconnected from the price.
> We know there are asteroids with price changing amounts of precious metals - we aren't mining them.
Are there?
As I understand it, the mass of the asteroid belt is primarily confined to just a handful (about 12) of objects, and everything else is so diffuse that it would never be profitable.
I think they are going for the smaller ones anyway, given they are looking to fetch and park them closer for the actual mining. If you are patient and know some orbital mechanics, it takes surprisingly little energy to move stuff around up there. If you can automate it and be sending missions out regularly, sure it takes a while to get your first asteroid back, but after that you can have a steady supply.
Presumably, any public or insider information about a credible funded technologically-sound attempt to mine the asteroid would crash the market first. So, the first sign of such an attempt would be huge shorts in the paper commodity markets by the people funding the mission. They would have to make their money on the financial hedging, not on the actual sale of mined PMs.
Perhaps it also means that Bitcoin has a more credible claim to a limited future supply than traditional PMs with a "proven 5,000 year track record".
Yeah, but if you look at that paper, platinum is extracted at roughly $20,000,000 per tonne--roughly the price of a single rocket launch right now. And we extract only 200 tons per year. That's a $20 billion market, but it's so sensitive to supply that nobody is rushing to open more mines.
Commercialization involves so much more than proving it can be done physically. And it also involves more than meeting a price in a padded environment. There are hurdles to jump that are totally disconnected from the price.