Base Rock

[Chago09]

Carib Sea makes a baserock that is only $59 for 50lbs. Thats like 1$ per lb. I don't see why I must buy the $10 per lb live stuff when this is the exact same thing except dried, correct???

So for example if I buy a 50 lb box of base rock for my 75 gallon tank, and then add 20 lbs of live stuff just to seed it. Would or would not the base rock do the exact same job when it comes to biologically filtering the tank and growing coroline algeas etc???

Second question if I add live rock to the tank in the future, is there a way of doing it that won't cause the tank to cycle again???

Would adding base rock to the tank later cause any cycle at all???