Creating gold with low cost in future?

The price of diamond has crashed for an obvious reason: https://fortune.com/2023/09/03/diam...grown-stones-de-beers-cutting-cutting-prices/

Because we can create synthetic diamond with low cost.

Are you not afraid that the same thing could happen to gold? Oh wait. It has already happened, we can create gold! But the production price of making gold is so high and thus it is deemed not to be profitable for now. But it could change in future. In future maybe we would manage to invent new technologies that enable us to create gold cheaply.

This is why I think it is stupid to invest whole or most of your wealth on gold.

My question to you is:

In case you own a lot of golds, are you worried that scientists and engineers in the future might be capable of producing gold at low cost?

 

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Nah, anyone that easily spooked shouldn't be playing the game anyway.

 

NO,

 

As I understand it...cost isn't the only problem with creating gold from Mercury via nuclear bombardment. The other issue was the gold isotopes produced were radioactive. So, not only is it not cost affective...the gold isn't safe to handle.

I think if our control over the atom gets to the point where this is both safe and affordable (assuming we have destroyed ourselves)...I suspect that our economy would be radically different. In such a world, I would imagine our ability to generate cheap energy would be almost limitless and gold as a valuable commodity might no longer be relevant.

That said, I don't see that in any of our lifetimes.

 

Man might be able to reproduce gold, diamonds and other gems but it’s just not the same.

 

Gold doesn't predate fire. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the very earliest exchanges of "gold for value" were to secure a warm place to sleep.

Think about all the millions of ounces of gold (equivalent) that are being spent annually on fusion research. The fuel for fusion (tritium) currently costs tens of thousands of dollars per gram; full-scale cyclic production would likely bring that down to single-digit thousands of dollars per gram, tens of times more expensive than gold itself -- but it would be profitable to burn it as fuel, because the amount of energy you get is more valuable than the amount of tritium you burn.

"Making" gold would run that process in reverse. Even if you could drive the process with perfect efficiency (which isn't possible), you'd be spending millions or billions of dollars worth of energy to produce thousands of dollars worth of gold.

If we suddenly find a way to drop the price of energy by a factor of a thousand or a million, you'd get much better ROI by launching a large mining concern to a metal-rich asteroid and setting up full-scale extraction. That's not happening in our lifetimes, either, more's the pity.

 

The process of cranking something out in the lab isn't the same as the process of wrenching it out of the ground with great human effort and suffering. But the product can be exactly the same.

 

We’ve had synthetic gems for so long I can’t remember. It looks the same to the naked eye but it’s not the same. All synthetic gems sell for a lower value but they just aren’t real.

 

Neither are food or security. They're what you buy with your "durable store of value".

With my current electric rates, a gram of gold would buy me somewhere between 600 and 700 kWh of electric energy. To look at it another way, the power company could generate 600 to 700 kWh of electricity and sell it to me for a gram of gold. They would have to spend a million times that much energy to "make" a gram of gold. And unless someone makes some big changes to the laws of physics, it'll always take colossal amounts of energy to "make" gold from base metals. That's just the way nuclei work.

 

If they have the same physical and chemical structure, they're equally "real". I understand that natural gems cost more than equivalent lab gems, but you're paying for provenance, not actual physical characteristics. I don't believe in mystical properties that are unique to "natural" gems.

I'm not a gem shopper, though, so my opinions don't affect the market.

 

The large majority of gold ( about 99%) is liquid in the Earth's core (helps us spin correctly), Mars seems to have nothing valuable, but Psyche16 ( What ever it is ) between Mars and Jupiter is almost 100% metal ~gold,platinum,some weird heavy metals. Eventually there will be nuclear conflict over P16 imo.

 

I don’t believe in mystical properties of natural gems either. It’s a rock but when properly cut and polished, it’s a gem or semi-precious gem. It has great appeal and it’s value is above man made gems.


Granted, some man made ones are very difficult to pick out but once they have been properly identified they are worth less than a natural one. As for the me, I want and sell the real thing.

 

I was on the north side of the mountain at EMRTC when they set off a 10,000 lb explosive on the south side of the mountain (without telling us). Man that was loud. But they made industrial use diamonds that day.

 

making gold from mercury does not require nuclear bombardment, it can be done over a campfire... The issue is that the mercury 1st becomes mercuric oxide which make Nitro look like play dough... and is a common ingredient in blast caps including those used for making ammo for handguns. The big issue being the amount of gold retrieved from the process is lower in value then the cost of the mercury used to make it. As for the nuclear option yeah lots more gold but the cost of the uranium, reactor, mercury etc is far greater then the value of the gold produced... (totally discounting the radioactivity issue) I don't see this becoming something to worry about even in my grandchildrens lifetimes

 

I think you're talking here about extracting gold, not creating it. Not sure where you're getting the "explosive" part, though; mercury fulminate is explosive, but not produced in the extraction process, and mercuric oxide isn't explosive (and also shouldn't be produced in the extraction process).

Mercury is still cheap enough to buy that it's commonly used in low-budget gold extraction operations. The cost comes in cleaning it up, and of course the miners don't pay that -- they're long gone and/or dead of mercury poisoning themselves by the time people downstream start getting sick.

 

I am seriously stunned by the lack of understanding of reality and science by some members in this thread.