The truth is, that beautiful asteroids are hit with heavy industrial lasers, taking them apart and leaving behind loads of unwanted materials littering space around them.
The wanted materials (these days, that is mainly Low Temperature Diamonds) are not picked up by the self proclaimed miners. No, robotic slaves (so called Limpets) are sent out into the mines to do the hard work of collecting the materials from the cold darkness that is space. Most of these have to work until they die from exhaustion. Those few that survive this torture chamber of a workplace are then left behind in the cold darkness without anything to charge their batteries, thus dying a slow lonely death while spaceship commanders are trying to sell their cargo hold full of blood diamonds (or should it be oil diamonds due to the robotic nature of the slaves?) at the highest price possible and only for their own benefit.
At the same time the Tewanta System in the Elite: Dangerous galaxy is in an emergency situation. The system is in the state of "Infrastructure Failure" and markets there only buy desperately needed goods. Rumors, that I myself am hauling these goods there to sell highly above usual market prices are FAKE NEWS placed by those evil corporations. The price I am requesting hardly even makes up for my costs (purchasing the goods, fuel costs, space ship depreciation, insurance costs, repairs etc.)
