Or what if you use it as collateral to buy work from those who seem prove a willingness to drive more value into the infrastructure?
Kind of create an "escape velocity" to defeat or at least mitigate the dilution that comes from mining astroids for gold and silver.
In this case I see each mining operation as piece of common infrastructure that benefit the entire community. But if new communities arise that know how to use the gold and create NEW demand for it via innovation, now you can create escape velocity from the dilution.
So in this context, if the man has 1 trillion in gold and knows adding it to current supply is dangerous longterm, he should only unlock portions of it to give to fund new and innovative projects after completing them and leverage the gold until then to provide funding where possible to help find the next set of innovators.
Do not forget that such amount of gold would decrease the value of gold itself by a factor of 100 at least. Gold has value because its difficult and coslty to extract. With this new asteroid the value of gold would drop to new lows. What the man should do is to keep it hidden and lie about it, sell small amounts of gold everyday. Nobody would know the supply increased by that much until they all got ripped off by our man and his new found gold. The gold market is too small to absord such an amount of physical metal. If I was the man I would maximize my return but all the people who would buy my gold would end up with worthless metal.
Also if he found a gold asteroid its safe to assume he could find another one and drop the value of gold even more in the future.
What if i i replace this scene with one wherein the "gold" is replaced with "data"
Do you feel this changes the situation?
I can't tell, i'm a trader on the comex for gold and silver. I don't know about data but I know about gold.