Diamond prices are down 60% since a 2011 high, and they are still falling. It's not all down to lab-grown diamonds, demand is down too, especially in China.
No one can lab-grow gold yet, so its rarity and scarcity protect its value, but that will end too. It's just a question of when. China launched an asteroid touch-down mission this week, which will make it the 4th country/region to do so, after Europe, the US & Japan.
How soon will it be feasible to mine asteroids? Who knows, but a breakthrough in space propulsion might mean the prospect happens quickly when it does. It's possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left.
Gold's fall may be more significant. It has a central role in stabilizing the value of global currencies.
The $80 Billion Diamond Market Crash Leaves De Beers Reeling
Lab-grown diamonds have helped diamond prices plunge 60%, and former monopolist De Beers is in crisis mode. One day asteroid mining will do the same for gold.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
18 Comments
Let’s lab make some houses and cars so the prices of those will come down, too.
The value of diamonds and gold aren’t really comparable. I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that the cost of gold is heavily linked to the cost of mining/refining the gold. Gold is also a useful metal outside of jewelry. Diamonds price is largely based on the perceived value due to advertising, and while there are industrial uses for diamond, the industrial use diamonds are largely lab made already.
Mining asteroids may one day be feasible, but I doubt it will be cheap in the foreseeable future. We have massive ocean gold deposits on Earth, but mining them would be too costly (nearly impossible with current tech).
From what I understand, it’s believed that diamonds are actually pretty common and the big diamond companies keep supplies artificially scarce. Now that lab diamonds are here they can’t play that card anymore.
Gold has various practical uses. It also occupies a unique position in the periodic table in terms of its physical properties. Diamonds also have practical uses, but industrial diamonds and gem diamonds do not overlap in the market.
Even if gold were mined in large quantities on another planet, I do not think that the price of gold would plummet. This is because if large quantities of gold were to enter the Earth, new demand would be created to match it.
Eventually we’ll be able to replicate every material in the lab with the exception of gold-pressed latinum. My lobes are already burning with excitement.
It’s more likely that mining robots will be able to dig up more gold, than spacecraft zipping around fetching gold from space because of some *Star Trek* breakthrough in rocketry.
The value of gemstone diamonds is an oddity and not comparable to the value of gold. There’s no good secondary market for diamonds. Nobody invests in diamonds. You might invest in a diamond mine or a company that manufactures or markets diamonds, but you don’t invest in the stones themselves. Their value has always been perishable.
So say I’m trying to sell the idea of tugging an asteroid full of gold into near-earth orbit. I point out that the asteroid has over 10 billion tons of gold in it.
How do I estimate that value? It certainly can’t be based on gold’s current value.
Asteroid mining for gold will probably never be valuable. It’s too common. It’ll sooner be made by some clever radioactive decay than asteroid mining.
space mining has a big catch 22 – even if you get the costs down, the drop in prices from the glut of supply complicate profitability. and gold wouldn’t be the best mineral to start with- platinum is more profitable at the moment
mission‐level costs are something like 500 m–$2 b to extract/return tens of kg of platinum. this far exceeds potential revenue at current platinum prices ($30 to $40k/kg), making short‐term return on investment unviable.
key barriers to overcome are high launch and transit costs, immature microgravity processing and unclear regulatory frameworks; breakthroughs in cost reduction, processing tech, and legal clarity are needed for commercial feasibility.
and then you face the risk of depressing metal prices with market influx
I think the realistic scenario is extreme scarcity of a particular mineral will drive space mining at unprofitable costs… and it likely won’t have an impact on market prices for the next century.
I think it’s really all about the monopoly/oligopoly power.
De Beers tried their best to control mining and commercialization. They were able to with natural diamonds, but failed once lab grown diamonds came out.
Gold’s price is protected by the governments that use it. They control it with laws, ie making it illegal/legal to use as currency. For example, Florida just made it legal for citizens to use gold to pay debt and taxes. By controlling the laws they control some of the demand.
Then there’s also the issue with storage, so most people who trade it buy bonds for gold that is supposed to be stored somewhere, key emphasis on “supposed”. Remember when the US Government “misplaced” the gold Germany gave them for storage a couple of years ago?
The idea that gold is useful in electronics and the like is fake, I mean it was until it became so expensive. The difference between gold and other metals in conductive performance in electronics is not enough to justify the price.
Countries keep finding gold mines that are relatively easy to mine compared to the sea bed, yet the price rarely fluctuates.
Who do you think would be in charge of mining the asteroids if it came to that?
The people most interested in mining gold from the asteroids will probably be the ones most interested in keeping the price up.
Making gold from lead was just proved possible. Back when diamonds were made in a lab the first time, the process was too expensive, but technology got better, and the price of diamonds increased making the lab process finally viable and profitable.
I don’t think mining gold from asteroids will be the game changer. And I seriously think gold’s price is already being artificially controlled to keep it from going down. But unlike DeBeers, gold is controlled by governments which have way more power. I don’t think we’ll see the price of gold fall drastically in our lifetimes. There’s too much at stake for too many countries. DeBeers can go bankrupt, and countries will survive.
Lab grown are better in every possible way.
1. Less damage to the environment – Check
2. No chance of conflict diamonds – Check
3. Significantly cheaper to get to market – Check
4. Wrecking De Beers and other diamond producers and at large an industry that cause untold human and enviromantal suffering and damage – Check.
Going from lab grown diamonds to the conclusions about gold is a pretty wild leap.
Gold will be treated as now, limited in supply to keep prices high.
But even though other materials are rarer, gold stays higher.
Gold and precious metals will not be in veins or alluvial deposits like on earth. They will be in ore form and will be very difficult to extract in zero gravity.
You’d almost have to land the damn thing on earth so it can be processed and a lot of people will have a problem with throwing rocks at us from space (think The Expanse, but for money).
Rightfully so. Many markets are effectively cartels or monopolies. They need to crash.
Let’s not get too excited about this. Sure, some asteroids have a lot of valuable minerals in them, but the shear logistics of getting to one of them with equipment suitable for mining them, and then returning to Earth, is overwhelming.
This endeavor reminds me of someone saying we should mine the ocean, because it contains 20 million tons of gold, worth $100 million per ton! And, the ocean is at our doorstep. So, why haven’t we done this? It is simply not financially feasible – just as the feasibility of mining asteroids is probably centuries in the future.
Asteroid mining…anything you think is possible within 25 years is probably 50-100+ years away. I think it’s more likely we figure out how to synthesize gold before we mine it from asteroids.
I would say no, gold is much more valuable in space unless we can build a space elevator or system to move mass from earth to space cheaply. Gold is used for thermal protection, for Electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance, Radiation shielding and much more. So taking it down to earth doesn’t make sense. So I think future space travel will require even more gold than any space mining could gain us