This competition is expressed by:

• Associations between cultivators (the stronger ones dominate the smaller ones).
• Strong competition between cultivators and the falling of prices.

How are we supposed to protect the market when everyone knows now where and how to find flint?

This could be done by increasing the production and/or reducing the prices and or improving the product. How is this done? By discovering that the flint can be cut by hand or with fire itself. Therefore, refining which is the cutting of the flint. These were the first cases of value of a mineral. Therefore, industrialization of the process with the creation of cut workshops, providing a finished product to commercialization (axes, knives, and so forth). However, this causes and increases the needs and the demand. Out of which the search of new deposits is done turning into prospecting and the cycle then closes. All of this lasted until when some, by mistake, changed iron for quartzite by melting it and discovering new properties and the source of such. A new cycle began once again and that made people abandon the old system and created the need of an economic conversion of the cultivators of quartzite.

In present time a good mining investigation is always directed towards a rational relation between the risk and expected benefit. It is not an easy thing because each phase has the need of a critical exam, technical data, and in both the economic and financial aspects. In the light of all of this, the risk will also need to be valued and the expectations should be defined. It will have to be decided if to continue on with the search or not and in the first place, define a new objective and value the necessary means to attain it. In the time that it advances, these decisions will always be heavier and greater to the risk of passing the successive phase without good appraisal of the previous phase. The greatest financial losses are often faced up not in the exploration phase, but rather in the phase of advantage when this it is verified as not being profitable, after the investigations that have been made have been decided on based on an incomplete geological study. The decision of considering an indication like a target is not something that can be as criticized as that of considering how a deposit from a target that has not been appropriately studied, (an abnormality is denominated as a “target” when it has been decided to use the study and consider it as a potential deposit).