It's far more practical to ask "Who would buy such a thing?", and then determine what they had access and authorisation to trade. For example, Microsoft might trade billions of dollars for it. The US Department of Defence might also do such a thing. EDIT: Or, if you were 'selling' it to a Promethean, it might give you resources to make your own habitats and starships, or control over a Pandora Gate. Hell, it might even give you some of its CPU time, which would effectively allow you to hack whatever you want as long as a connection could be made. Gate addresses to pristine Earth-like worlds might also be viable trades.

Just to be clear, Computronium refers to some undefinable stuff that just can be used for computing things, but is not understood, right? And it's usually applied to TITAN leftovers only, or to any piece of tech in EP that just cannot be defined by today's knowledge (so it's acting as a "placeholder" of sorts)? Personally, if Computronium applies only to TITAN tech, I wouldn't touch it even with a long stick, just in case... ^^

babayaga wrote:

The question is a little like asking: how much is an ounce of uranium worth today? Not much. But you start acquiring it in large quantities, and separating U238 from U235... now, *that* means trouble.

The going price for plutonium today is about $10,000/g, to be compared with gold at around $58/g. (Did I mention I love having a job where looking up things like this is normal?) There is computronium and there is computronium. It is a bit like asking what a microchip is worth - microprocessors are really expensive, while an old 555 time IC is quite cheap today. It also depends on the usability and who wants to buy it. As I see it, basic TITAN computational modules are uncommon but not unknown. The stuff that was in Glory was not too different from normal pre-Fall computing matrices, and there are no doubt lots of the stuff lying around (and being dangerous). The major groups all have samples and blueprints. Not worth much in itself, except if you sell it to crazies and shady people who want it for bad reasons. Then there is the late TITAN stuff like the Iapetus construction. This is high-level stuff that is beyond transhuman comprehension but likely nowhere near the ultimate limits of physics (it runs on molecules, after all). This is rare and scary, but there are a few places where you can find it. Various groups are interested in getting samples and studying it; it is expensive but not instant millionaire. Then there is the true postsingularity stuff, the things that is not even built according to anything transhuman science has conceived of. This is the thing that gatecrashers and others really crave: just by existing it advances science enormously, and people who get to study it expect to benefit immensely. If you find something that looks it would be useful (and not just dangerously incomprehensible) you are a rich person. But the value depends on the abilities to analyse things. In the above Pentium vs 555 comparison, imagine that you gave a circuit board holding the chip to Edison or Tesla. I think both with a bit of ingenuity, effort and luck would quickly figure out what the 555 was doing. The Pentium would not make much sense - they would understand amplifiers, flipflops and timers (555 stuff), but they would have no concept of digital logic, memory and machine code. Picking apart the chips they would learn roughly the same: important ideas about semiconductors, but the 555 would be easy to study to reveal *how* it did all those useful thing while the Pentium would just be complex. While it may have been a challenge for Edison or Tesla to figure out how to make semiconductors, dope them and make a transistor at least, they would have learned more from the 555 than the Pentium. So in the case of computronium, the "simple" TITAN stuff is really useful for advancing electronics and computer science because it is not totally beyond transhumans. Companies pay for reverse engineering, and less cutting edge groups use it to try to leapfrog ahead. The super-advanced stuff is important mainly as an inspiration and demonstration, it is rarely possible to understand. I would imagine Edison would have paid handsomely for a computer motherboard, but it would mostly have been a desk decoration. The exception is of course near-singularity entities like the Prometheans and their cousins. They actually can reverse engineer some of the advanced stuff.

Arenamontanus wrote:

babayaga wrote:

The question is a little like asking: how much is an ounce of uranium worth today? Not much. But you start acquiring it in large quantities, and separating U238 from U235... now, *that* means trouble.

The going price for plutonium today is about $10,000/g, to be compared with gold at around $58/g. (Did I mention I love having a job where looking up things like this is normal?)

I'm not sure how plutonium got dragged into this discussion :) The market price of *Uranium* (or more precisely, Uranium oxide -- U3O8) today is between 0.10$ and 0.20$ per gram. Right *now* it's about 0.12$/gram, so the cost of (enough Uranium oxide to contain) an ounce of Uranium is less than 4 dollars.

I would just like to clarify that when the OP said "old world economy" I assumed he was talking about "today's" prices, and being injected into the economy in the year 2011. Sorry, I think I misunderstood.