Market Discussions

You can find it all over Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra.

Surely people need their hardened cobalt bars for making T2 ships no?

I have repeatedly pointed out that the price of cobalt, for the purposes of tech alchemy, should be treated as zero. I realized I should elaborate on why.

Bottlenecking

There is a cap on the number of moons that can be profitably alchemized. Tech is profitable because it is a bottleneck: all of it is used up before any other moon mineral is. If too much tech is alchemized tech ceases being a bottleneck, and the next rarest mineral (relative to use) becomes the bottleneck. In our case, that's neodymium (which is rising on the theory that tech will be over-nerfed making it either the sole bottleneck or tied with tech). Once neo is the bottleneck and not tech, the price of tech will crater well below the break-even point for alchemy. As a result, of the thousands of cobalt moons, only a fraction can be alchemized before the bottleneck loosens enough it's no longer profitable.

That means that there is a hard cap on cobalt moons that can be used for alchemy: if that number is exceeded, alchemy can only operate at a loss until people are driven out of the market.

Why People Will Always Mine Cobalt When Doing Alchemy

When making an alchemy pos, it is better in every single situation to mine the cobalt instead of buying and importing it. As you may know, the fitting requirements for a silo and a moon miner are exactly the same. This means that any reaction that uses base minerals fits on a pos and uses the same fuel regardless of if one, both, or none of its components are mined on that moon. In other words, you incur absolutely no extra costs to mine a mineral rather than import it (while saving the cost of purchasing it and importing it).

This means in every situation it is feasible to do so, you would rather mine your minerals than import them - even if someone will give them to you in jita for free. There are only two situations where you will not:

1)You can't get that moon. If I'm making nanotransistors, I'd like to mine the tech directly. But since I can't get a tech moon, i simply must buy the tech: it is not an option to mine tech myself.

2)You can get the moon, but it would be inconvenient. If I'm making nanotransistors, I can't mine the tech, but maybe I can mine the platinum. But if there's platinum moons available, but none in my system, I may want to buy the platinum rather than deal with towers outside my home system. Effort costs isk, after all.

But Things You Mine Aren’t Free

Opportunity cost is what you could have made, if you did something else. So if you’re mining ordinary ore, the cost of that ore (to you) is the isk you could have made otherwise (say, by ratting). And if you use those minerals yourself, the cost of those minerals (to you) is the money you could have made if you’d sold them on the market instead. Both of those mean if you’re in a hulk and mining ore, the ore isn’t free: it costs you what you gave up.
For Cobalt, that means you are comparing alchemizing cobalt, to mining it and selling it. To mine the cobalt, you need a small tower, and a small tower’s worth of fuel. Since there is virtually infinite amounts of cobalt in the game, the price of cobalt generally equals the exact cost of mining it: in other words you don’t make any money doing it. People who mine cobalt have a tower doing other things (ratting, labs) and use spare grid and cpu to get “free” cobalt (and other ‘worthless’ minerals).
When alchemizing cobalt on a moon instead of mining it, you are “giving up” the chance to put a small tower there and mine it for export. Since that makes no profit the opportunity cost of alchemizing cobalt is…zero. So mining it yourself is free.

Conclusion

There are thousands of Cobalt moons. Not only will we never run out, we will never run out of convenient ones: there is so much cobalt that there are plenty of systems with many cobalt moons and a station. There are more of these ‘convenient’ moons than can be profitably alchemized, probably by a factor of two or more.

As a result, no one will buy cobalt off the market. It will not make sense at any price: even if it’s free, you have to ship it and keep silos full. You’ll just mine it instead. As a result, the effective price of cobalt for the purposes of setting the price of technetium is zero.

That's just a drop in the ocean compared to what you can make from other items.
I'm not showing off here, just want to give an example, only yesterday I made 2Bil just from one item.

The Russians seem to think Cobalt is worth all the fuss. They've snapped up a ton of cobalt moons in the Genesis region with undefended caldari towers, each containing one moon harvester and one reactor. Three guesses as to what they're making.

My point was it wasn't moving until I made this forum post for 2 weeks and suddenly all sold... coincidence.. I think not.

And my point was that it sold, not that I made a lot.