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Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

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Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#271

Post by celestialcheese »

alchemism wrote: post #239
userbinator wrote: post #15

As the price of diamond continues dropping, I wonder if people will find more interesting applications of the material and it'll eventually become as mundane as things like steel and aluminium. Besides its hardness, it also has very high thermal conductivity. Diamond is still too expensive to be a bulk material, but I look forward to when things like this become cheap and commonplace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fi…

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age examines, among other topics, the socio-economic impact of cheap plentiful diamonds produced by molecular nanotech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

Such a fantastic book.

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#272

Post by autokad »

sharpneli wrote: post #16
saagarjha wrote: post #3

> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".

Saying lab grown gems are fake is like saying "Is that Orchid you bought me a fake from greenhouse or a real one that someone picked from a jungle?" It's funny what massive marketing campaign can do.

Would you want a Mickey Mantle rookie card or a flawless counterfeit? I have a feeling you want the former

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#273

Post by hoosieree »

sharpneli wrote: post #16
saagarjha wrote: post #3

> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".

Saying lab grown gems are fake is like saying "Is that Orchid you bought me a fake from greenhouse or a real one that someone picked from a jungle?" It's funny what massive marketing campaign can do.

Or "Would you rather buy a diamond from your friendly local diamond farmer or from the diamond poacher cartel?"

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#274

Post by scott00 »

avisser wrote: post #209
cptskippy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's organic vs synthetic. Not real vs fake. There was a similar problem with Rubies and they detected the fakes by virtue of the fact that they were flawless.

All the carbon is ultimately from a star. And the pressure that makes the real/organic diamond is 0% organic. Geo-sourced vs anthro-sourced?

I like mined diamond vs lab diamond.

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#275

Post by kragen »

sampo wrote: post #253
wbl wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining the ore isn't the problem. Extraction is. Gold is native gold, so easy to seperate. Iron requires clever furnaces and processing to produce, and it's not until recently we could make mild steel consistently.

Iron extraction is not very high tech after one has the know-how. But it took time to develop the knowledge. https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/forge-b...

On a more-than-proof-of-concept scale, you have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ, a traditional blacksmith family in Burkina Faso mining a few kilograms of iron with several person-days of work, which is probably about 1000× as productive as the Primitive Technology guy achieved (perhaps a gram of iron after about a person-day of work). But the US steel industry employs 87000 people to produce about 120 million tonnes of iron and steel per year, which works out to about 5000 kg of iron and steel per person-day. (And that's why Burkina Faso imports its iron instead of smelting it in the way demonstrated in that documentary, the way they had done for the previous 2500 years, until some French guys wrecked a Jeep there in the early 20th century.)

So there are something like six or seven orders of magnitude over which "high-tech" machinery can increase your iron productivity, or, to look at it another way, over which the price of iron can vary even once you have the know-how.

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#276

Post by sduclos »

tsaoyu wrote: post #146
lawlessone wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now we can make more diamonds :) there will never be more than 21 million bitcoin

Great business idea. Here is the freshly made AD[1]. Curious to see if there is any business plan follow ups. [1]( https://i.imgur.com/oD50taU.png )

Priceless!

So, a real diamond of fake value is used to engrave fake value of real bitcoin .. or something ..

xkcd material!

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#277

Post by ancap »

ameister14 wrote: post #268
ancap wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...That's transparency The criteria you specify for transparency is subjective and I don't agree that all of those criteria are strictly necessary. Specifically, I don't agree that knowledge of "provenance, relative supply and transport/marketing cost" is required of a buyer at all in a free market, though they may personally have an interest in those things. I would venture that most consumers know and care very li…

We don't currently have a free market, and most customers definitely do not know the provenance, relative supply or transport/marketing cost of almost anything they buy. They trust food, for example, because the government secures it and regulates it. >What's important is the principle of subjective value--that the buyer and the seller value what they are getting more than what they are giving up--and that can happen…

Even absent government regulation, I still don't see consumers being terribly concerned about the source of their apple. Why? Because the quality of it is reflected by the reputation of the seller. But even if I were to concede the argument for the particular case of food, that does not mean that knowledge of provenance is a prerequisite for a free market.

>You need the other things to move away from the necessity of government regulation

I guess this is the crux of the matter. You are suggesting that transparency must pre-exist a free market, I am suggesting that a free market pre-exists transparency, and when necessary transparency will be demanded by the consumers.

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#278

Post by BrandonM »

Jedd wrote: post #53
3pt14159 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s my favourite book of his, but I’ve stopped recommending it to non-programmers because I think much of it’s magic is knowing how much of it is actually possible in the future.

Possibly a key indicator of a quality SF idea / author -- how much closer we are to their universe a decade or two later. I've loved everything Neal's written, though I may begrudgingly agree with various critics that suggest he really doesn't do endings very well (REAMDE and Anathem are much, much better on this front). I've tried recommending various books of his to different friends, and I've concluded that I have…

REAMDE was his first book that I read. I was totally captivated by the book, but I hated the ending. That's one of his good endings?

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#279

Post by aeorgnoieang »

kenning wrote: post #206
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically 'free markets', at least among sincere proponents of them, don't include "blood being spilt"; that's what makes things un-free.

Here the guy you're replying to is talking about U.S. Libertarian ideology, which wouldn't care about foreign conflict of any type.

It's not true that U.S. libertarians don't "care about foreign conflict of any type".

Re: Lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems

#280

Post by vbezhenar »

scythe wrote: post #161
baldfat wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap titanium bikes are high on my list but I think the killer application is titanium hinges. Springs will last a lifetime. Looks like this is starting to happen alreadt: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/titanium-hinges.html $0.25 for a hinge Titanium is light, but my favorite thing is it is next to impossible to bend. So anything that shouldn't bend will be better with titanium.

I doubt it's happening already. Metalysis currently owns the patent rights to the process and is focusing on tantalum and zirconium (higher profit margins) while working on scaling it up.

Not everyone cares about patents. I think Chinese factories do not care and who cares whether the result product was patent-free or not.
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