I flipped an off-the-cuff example up to show how large chunks of inert material can be brought down to earth if you had to.
You're right that nobody in their right mind would dump a gigantic load of gold on the market all at once. The miners would ease up the amounts slowly to keep the prices high as long as possible, but there are a LOT of asteroids out there, and unlike DeBeers, there's too much stuff to artificially maintain the high prices for long.
Aluminum used to be a precious metal, used by Napoleon III as cutlery for his banquets. Now we wrap fish in it. If gold were cheap and plentiful, I can think of quite a few things that a non-tarnishing amazing conductor could be used for.
Podrock says "leave it in space," and in fact, that's mostly what would happen. Space is a huge heat sink with solar power on 100 percent of the time, and a pretty decent place for low-level heavy industry.
I suspect that if we had the tech to mine asteroids in the first place, we'd have the tech to refine the metals, and make them into usable end products, and we wouldn't really need to dump lots of raw material earthside.
Space/Science » in reply to The Gold Bug
I think you'd start out slow with the imports.