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

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#251

Post by artellectual » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:27 AM UTC

wyc wrote: post #247

Synthetic diamonds might be a disruptive innovation. They are often cheaper, lower quality, and lacking in complex features such as authenticity. There is a different and advantageous cost structure compared to that of mining for natural diamonds, and this product fulfills the new job of culling environmental and humanitarian concern. In this scenario, we may be witnessing an incumbent firm unable to adopt new disrup…

Lower Quality? Lacking in complex feature? authenticity? what is considered authentic? If i tell you water is authentic if it's made from 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom, in the same way that diamond is made from compressed carbon and whether synthetic or dug from the ground. when the chemical construct is the same what determines it as not being authentic and lower quality? In fact synthetic diamonds offer higher clarity than natural ones depending on which one you choose, they have visually perfect ones in the same way natural diamonds do. So where is this "lower quality" coming from?

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#252

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:30 AM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #147

thaumasiotes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Their goal is probably to try to quickly drive the price of man made diamonds down to the price of Moissanite, and create a artificial distinction between natural and man made dimaonds. > Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion than diamond. SiC has a greater index of refraction, which improves the properties of total-internal-reflection as well! As…

Mineral name wise, sapphires are a type of corundum. Usually blue, sometimes green, yellow, orange, or others, depending on various metals mixed into it. But if it’s red (via chromium) it’s a ruby instead. Clear crystalline aluminum oxide you’d generally just call corundum (or aluminum oxide if you’re not feeling fancy), but that doesn’t market as well when you’re making watch faces and camera lenses out of it, so I…

The names ruby and sapphire are not marketing driven; they are color terms that long predate the development of chemistry to the point where we could determine what gems were.

Many famous historical "rubies" are not corundum but spinel; they were called rubies because "ruby" was the term for any red gemstone.

"Moissanite" is purely marketing, though.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#253

Post by mdpopescu » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:32 AM UTC

jacobush wrote: post #235

briandear wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But see, any debate at all is blasphemy. The inability to accept skepticism is anti-science. There was a worldwide scientific consensus that Eugenics was a good thing in the early 1900s. But somehow the overwhelming “evidence” of its “benefits” suddenly fell out of favor. People that are hysterical about climate change are, incidentally in favor of the government curtailing freedom and controlling the means of produc…

The only way to coordinate humans across the globe is bolshevism?

No, that's the free market.

Bolshevism is required to force humans across the globe.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#254

Post by jacobush » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:34 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #193

namibj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case it's with the hard push to Hybrids, which is a major risk for the stability of the world's food supply (due to the strong mono culture, it's relatively easy for a willing player to first stock up on food, and then deliver pests for all major food hybrids that are only as effective because they are hybrids and not a healthy pool of genetic diversity. Also, if the hybrid seeds producing facilities were to be…

If it's so easy to deliver pests which target those crops then why hasn't any terrorist group done it yet? The reality is that it would be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible with current technology. Farmers aren't stupid. Monsanto has no way to prevent them from using non-hybrid seeds. Farmers will plant whichever seeds they expect to deliver the highest ROI. Grain production before pesticides was far lower. Bac…

What about Monsanto suing everyone?

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#255

Post by rebuilder » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:35 AM UTC

fgonzag wrote: post #10

"Lightbox will transform the lab-grown diamond sector by offering consumers a lab-grown product they have told us they want but aren't getting: affordable fashion jewelry that may not be forever, but is perfect for right now" This is clearly a play to devalue the image of man made diamonds. "May not be forever" my ass, it's the exact same thing. Their goal is probably to try to quickly drive the price of man made dia…

They're not the same. Physically, man-made diamonds tend to be superior to natural ones, or so I'm tood. But that's beside the point for consumers - they mostly don't buy based on physical criteria beyond size. They buy dimonds because it's the done thing, because they're expensive. If diamonds lose that exclusivity De Beers have gone to such lengths to uphold, I think they'll also lose their appeal.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#256

Post by muriithi » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:36 AM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #96

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the staggering number of anti-GMO laws and business ad campaigns.

GMO are a very powerful technology. Like anything powerful, an intelligent person calls for caution. A lot of people are worrying about GMO in food because we don't have enough data about them. We are changing things that could have important biological, health and ecological impacts, but the companies producing them are not willing to test them extensively for safety during 20 years before selling them. We don't kno…

I also do not have data on almost all the food that I eat.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#257

Post by peter_retief » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:43 AM UTC

I worked for De Beers about 30 years ago, already they used to produce some industrial diamonds artificially, it wasn't a big deal then but when you see what large volume industrial stones get mined from kimberlite pipes in existing mines it probably didn't make economic sense. Gem quality stones are far less common

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#258

Post by John_KZ » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:44 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.

Well, the whole point of diamonds is to show off wealth. Natural diamonds and their defects are more expensive and very hard to replicate crystallographically , so they're not doing anything unexpected.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#259

Post by tpolzer » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:46 AM UTC

Tyr42 wrote: post #171

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…

Compare synthetic vanilla flavouring vs plant based. Same molecule, but big price difference.

Have you ever compared Vanillin to real fresh Vanilla yourself? Yes, it replicates a large part of the flavor, but certainly not all of it.

Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds

#260

Post by im3w1l » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:47 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #13

kregasaurusrex wrote: post #2

This is great news for scientific research- diamonds for experimental purposes are a huge market that's impeded by their artificially high cost. From a material standpoint there's a multitude of uses for them- ranging from use in CERN's particle detectors for their high optical clarity, to creating nanodiamond transport mechanisms for drugs because of their resilience to microcellular activity. By creating a mass mar…

The Chinese have already done that --- at a fraction of the cost of DeBeers. Search AliBaba for "CVD diamond" and be amazed. Huge plates at <$100/carat.

That's still pretty expensive imo. I want $100 to get me a few ounces.