Modern Economics & Create/Snatcher

[Anthony]

Similarly, he can produce 1.14 barrels of oil per second, worth a bit over $100. If he doesn't want to deal with large quantities of bulk, gold is 82 million troy ounces per year, so he could probably produce a million troy ounces (worth over a billion dollars) without much altering world gold prices, though he'd draw a lot of attention. Actually, merely the knowledge of someone like him existing is sufficient to disrupt world markets.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by gilbertocarlos

Create Iron.
It is created 2.4 billion tons of iron every year, that means 275 thousand tons per hour, 76 tons per second.
Iron is worth US$100-150/ton.

If he sells 1 ton per day, he'll have a good life and will be worth only 0.000015% of the world production.
Even on the US only, his share will be worth only 0.00075%.
He'll change almost nothing on the market.

If he wants to be risky, he can sell 0.01% of US market, that'll mean US$500K-700K each year.
If he wants to be really risk, he could try 1% of US market, 50 to 70 million each year.

This will probably reduce the price of iron by 0.5-1%.

I think I would combine this with the scrapyard and diverse portfolio ideas.
a ton of various metels a week and your spreading he impact across several markets and if no one looks close you have a plausible source and wont stand out too much.

[Figleaf23]

Build a sham plant for a cover, then create electricity and sell it straight into the grid.

[gilbertocarlos]

Create silver and gold, there are more artificial stocks of it than exist in real life.

You could also sell it to preppers, they'll probably just hide it until apocalypse happens, and, if the apocalypse happens, you have bigger problems than the stock market.

[gilbertocarlos]

Produce 1% of everything, and then, produce 1% of money, you will compensate the decrease of prices with inflation.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by gilbertocarlos

Create Iron.
It is created 2.4 billion tons of iron every year, that means 275 thousand tons per hour, 76 tons per second.

This fellow described in the OP makes only one ton per second.

Iron is worth US$100-150/ton.

Or more. The scrap price is about 17¢ per pound for bulk batches.

If he sells 1 ton per day, he'll have a good life

$36,500 per year is not very much by US standards, especially as he has to cover tuition. He could get the same with 1/1000 of a second of gold, and easily pass that off as part of a family stash, or extracted by amateur working at a pretended goldmine.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

Build a sham plant for a cover, then create electricity and sell it straight into the grid.

Electricity isn't matter, alas, though might be able to use a weight-driven generator by creating matter up high over a long drop. 1000 kg dropping 100 meters produces 0.2725 kw-hours less conversion inefficiencies. This can be as little as 5% for big turbines, so he could produce 7800 kw-hours in an 8 hour day at a 100-m deep reservoir - about $1000. But I don't see a good way to launder it, unless he dresses up as a some kind of monster to scare people away from an abandoned dam....

[gilbertocarlos]

Originally Posted by Brett

This fellow described in the OP makes only one ton per second.

Yeah, but those figures is how much is produced worldwide, not how much he is going to produce, I suggested at most 1% of production, with will mean 18 hours/day. But 0.01% is more than enough, 10 minutes/day.

Originally Posted by Brett

$36,500 per year is not very much by US standards, especially as he has to cover tuition. He could get the same with 1/1000 of a second of gold, and easily pass that off as part of a family stash, or extracted by amateur working at a pretended goldmine.

Considering the financial situation of the country right now... Also, he works 5 minutes per year.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by gilbertocarlos

Yeah, but those figures is how much is produced worldwide, not how much he is going to produce

Ah. I see. I misconstrued your post. Sorry.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Ideas, ideas, ideas. Thanks for the responses. Picking and choosing quotes:

Originally Posted by reddir

Finished goods or the mining industry.

Finished goods are something he can't do. Mining is going to require an accomplice he can hide behind.

Originally Posted by Opellulo

"Least distruptive manners" for who? The PC identity? The market? The workers? The environment?

Borking his life isn't something he wants. Borking the market is likely going to get him (and others) into unpleasant situations that he probably can get out of ... but the getting out of is going to bork his life. Borking the workers and the environment, likewise.

Originally Posted by Opellulo

...and this is the reason we cannot have nice superheroes.

Yep!

Originally Posted by dcarson

Might be able to work through scrap yards. How detailed a shape can he make? Copper wire and pipe are worth decent money and easy enough to explain. Eventually becoming a scrap yard might make sense, that lets you add quite a bit of value to the normal business without questions.

Wires are lines. Pipes are hollow cylinders. He can do those shapes. I'll have to check into how much you can sell to a scrapyard without it getting especially noticeable, how much they're willing to buy and how much of an income he can reasonably get out of doing so with a minimal time investment.

Originally Posted by Brett

And a really good student picks a diverse portfolio of resources and makes a few tons of each thing.

A mix of the first three approaches should be doable. The fourth is likely to result in people dying and he'd rather avoid that.

(I was hoping you'd respond to this thread. Heh.)

Originally Posted by Brett

As for the income it can produce. Gross world product is about $72 trillion per year, and any significant fraction of that would be disruptive by sheer scale. The character should probably hold it down to about, say, $500 billion per year. If he figures that it would be grossly disruptive for people to even know that he is capable of crashing any commodity price on a whim, then he probably tries to keep what he is doing a secret or disguise it as a bunch of other things. Then figure that he probably ought to hold it down to a couple of hundred million per year or so, and avoid commodities such as coffee and cocoa for which provenance is usually tracked.

That'd be roughly Multimillionaire 5 and Independent Income 25, in order to generate G$500 billion a year in income without having to have a job. The character has the point budget for it at least.

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Another option would be to create things that are dangerous or expensive to transport, bypassing that particular expense. This guy would be pretty great to smuggle onto the International Space Station. He could make quite a lot of water in Arabia too.

If he didn't mind, he could get a job as a magician and have a gig in Vegas. Or he could start churning out the antihydrogen or even regular hydrogen, but he'd probably need an accomplice he could trust for anything big like that.

These involve leaving his present location and abandon his studies. He'd rather not.

Not to mention that mass producing weapons-grade nuclear materials would be suicidally foolish even though he has the ability to do it. Touching the antimatter in order for it to count as a sample would be bad enough on its' own!

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Brett's right that anything he can do will have an economic impact on someone. Even if he starts making giant stone blocks and pyramids out in the desert, then he'll still be pulling tourist dollars away from somewhere.

Yep. Hence the desire to minimize the disruption, not avoid all disruption.

Originally Posted by Anthony

In general, not flooding the market means that his production is fairly small next to the total size of that market. He could probably create a billion dollars of crude oil per year and not flood the market, though it would be annoying on a practical level because that's something like a million tons. If he's only interested in a million dollars a year or so there are vast numbers of choices. However, if he's concerned with drawing attention it's going to require a fair amount of work to make yourself seem like a plausible legitimate source for whatever it is.

Avoiding unnecessary attention is part of his intent, right. An accomplice he can hide behind is sounding like a good idea.