De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds • Hacker News Board

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#291

Post by Retric » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

solatic wrote: post #266

ISL wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love for synthetic diamond to bring the price down on gemstones. A lot of people are engaged in arduous and risky work to produce natural stones. The environmental costs, too, are real. Modern high-quality synthetic materials, whether in gemstones or other uses, have so much to offer in fashion innovation. Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion tha…

> The real beauty of many stones is in the cut, not the base material. If you can create the exact same rough/uncut synthetic diamond, and therefore can deterministically reproduce the same cut on each diamond, then the decision of how to cut that diamond becomes intellectual property and is potentially copywritable. If de Beers really can't hold back the synthetic market, they'll find a way to take it over, and lega…

You can't get a copyright on simple geometric shapes, they would need something bizarre looking to not have been created in the past. Further, stones are both tiny and shiny so people can't really tell what they look like.

A more realistic option is use nanoscale etching to get unique colors. Much like those blue butterfly wings that don't use pigment.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#292

Post by tomtimtall » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

Translation: De Beers is losing the battle, so they are now going to pretend to be both sides of the battle and stage a victory for themselves.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#293

Post by amelius » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:18 AM UTC

Question: can man-made diamonds be distinguished from natural diamonds in a blind test? If so, could they be engineered to be indistinguishable?

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#294

Post by lawlessone » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:21 AM UTC

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #245

propogandist wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slogan "a diamond is forever" is one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time. It encourages people to voluntarily limit circulation of a rock that's mined by the tonnes, whose supply is carefully controlled to keep profits high. The links they've made with the slogan to love also helps keep the money flowing.

It is deviously brilliant. Play on people's emotions, equate a diamond with "till death do us part", make it almost shameful to even consider reselling that stone. Is there any other product where resale is "voluntarily" limited like that?

bitcoin? "HODL"

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#295

Post by jdietrich » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:22 AM UTC

solatic wrote: post #266

ISL wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love for synthetic diamond to bring the price down on gemstones. A lot of people are engaged in arduous and risky work to produce natural stones. The environmental costs, too, are real. Modern high-quality synthetic materials, whether in gemstones or other uses, have so much to offer in fashion innovation. Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion tha…

> The real beauty of many stones is in the cut, not the base material. If you can create the exact same rough/uncut synthetic diamond, and therefore can deterministically reproduce the same cut on each diamond, then the decision of how to cut that diamond becomes intellectual property and is potentially copywritable. If de Beers really can't hold back the synthetic market, they'll find a way to take it over, and lega…

Gem-quality synthetic diamonds are cut in essentially the same way as natural diamonds.

The most important commercial cut (the brilliant) was described in Marcel Tolowsky's 1919 book Diamond Design, so would not be copyrightable without some tremendous legal gymnastics. De Beers could dream up some "improvement" to the brilliant cut and trademark it, but there really isn't much room for improvement. The cut that Tolowsky described is very, very close to the mathematical ideal for brilliance and fire. Most of the later optimisations in diamond modelling are in the public domain.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#296

Post by tobyhinloopen » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:28 AM UTC

artellectual wrote: post #232

My wife and I got married without buying a diamond ring. I simply refused to spend money in things that are overvalued by the market because some marketing scheme was so strong that it made facts look silly. I told her that I refuse to spend money on things that cause other people pain. Especially when there is no guarantee that the diamond we buy are not blood diamond. Instead we invested our money in buying things…

Kinda same here, but without the ethics: I just refuse to pay for a shiny stone when there are much cheaper shiny stones. I just got a gold ring with zirconia (whatever that is spelled).

For the "couples ring" (whatever that is called in english, i dont know) my suggestion is to just get 2 solid rings of gold. Gold is actually worth something, I like that.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#297

Post by sethgecko » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11

Interestingly enough, this starts to bring up questions that have previously only been super active in science fiction circles, particularly, Star Trek: If you can perfectly recreate something down to the molecular level, what actually has value? (Assuming, someday, that synthetic versions are excessively cheap, in Star Trek's case.) If you can replicate cooked food perfectly, will people still claim that "real" food…

This video that was uploaded yesterday explains very well how humans inherently value scarcity, even from a very young age. It could be shells/weird looking stones/trading cards/gold/cryptocurrency. If it is rare humans will value it.

If you could create diamonds at will in a lab the price of it's price is bound to go down significantly, it's not just a matter of supply and demand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKwqNgG-Sv4

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#298

Post by jk2323 » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:32 AM UTC

Borealid wrote: post #285

oblio wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Platinum is a boring metal, visually, difficult to distinguish by eye from steels, aluminum, and titanium. Platinum has very low reactivity so it doesn't rust, corrode, whatever easy, unlike the others. That's why it's considered valuable, because it looks almost the same after a lot of time.

Anodized aluminum and titanium don't rust - and if by whatever means you DO allow them to oxidize, the oxygen-bound outer layer forms a protective barrier against further rusting. Neither of those metals becomes structurally weaker in any meaningful way over time due to oxygen exposure.

"Anodized aluminum and titanium don't rust - and if by whatever means you DO allow them to oxidize, the oxygen-bound outer layer forms a protective barrier against further rusting."

So what? But they do melt. And you can't eat Titanium or Aluminum. We would starve to dead soon without Pt/Rh

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#299

Post by hessenwolf » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #220

adrianratnapala wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> man-made diamonds are much more likely to be purer and flawless. Hmm, both natural and man-made stones have price/quality trade-offs. I am no expert in the field, but I think both kinds are post-sorted into quality grades based on what flaws are found. And I guess labs can also tune their growth parameters for different trade-offs. So yes, for a given price and size, the artificial stone will have better quality --…

That's actually not my understanding. I have heard that most man-made stones are nearly flawless (at least when it comes to occlusions). Some processes have actually started introducing "fake" occlusions just to make them impossible to distinguish from the natural variety.

Nah, you need all sorts of quality grades for drilling, polishing, etc.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#300

Post by distances » Wed, May 30, 2018, 9:52 AM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #72

on_and_off wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, their entire business model depends on persuading their clients that natural diamonds are a rarity and better than human-created ones. So I don't really expect them to offer a non biased view here, even though their audacity is astounding.

Yep. I've seen lots of marketing spam on my elevator's "Captivate" box "educating" viewers on colored diamonds and how "natural" impurities make them that way. Very obvious ploy to increase the desirability of mined diamonds.

Off topic, but I'm not sure I got this -- you have advertisements in an elevator?