What happens to prices when gold is manmade? Just like diamonds are now lab grown..
ScarsdaleCoin
Posts: 5,331 ✭✭✭✭✭
Jon Lerner - Scarsdale Coin - www.CoinHelp.com
3
ScarsdaleCoin
Posts: 5,331 ✭✭✭✭✭
Comments
Interesting for the physics, but it still looks like it's a long way from being a process that produces permanent gold.
They managed to produce picogram quantities of gold... 10^-12... one trillionth of one gram... is this going to be scalable in out lifetimes?
Successful BST transactions with: SilverEagles92; Ahrensdad; Smitty; GregHansen; Lablade; Mercury10c; copperflopper; whatsup; KISHU1; scrapman1077, crispy, canadanz, smallchange, robkool, Mission16, ranshdow, ibzman350, Fallguy, Collectorcoins, SurfinxHI, jwitten, Walkerguy21D, dsessom.
I'm sure in large part it would depend on how much the process costs. Ignoring the super high cost of an infant process, if this ever becomes "easy" to do, does it cost $5 to make an ounce, or $2000? If the former, tons of gold would be made to the point where I bet prices would drop. If it's $2000 (or any significant cost, but still lower than the going rate for gold) then price wouldn't drop nearly as much.
I imagine gold would be harder to distinguish lab-made from mined compared to diamonds, though I understand even diamonds are getting harder to distinguish. I'll bet an ounce of man-made gold that we don't see this process effective to the extent of having an appreciable influence on the market in our lifetimes.
It will depend on if you can determine or distinguish between the two the way you can with diamonds. With diamonds you have a tiered pricing structure with natural diamonds costing more. I would expect the same dynamic to occur assuming you can differentiate between the natural and lab created gold.
My Collection of Old Holders
Never a slave to one plastic brand will I ever be.
To be more specific, they are making minuscule quantities of radioactive gold, the isotope gold-203, which has a half-life of about a minute. This is what the article means when it says "each atom only exists for a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart.". The only stable isotope of gold is gold-197, and no-one has successfully reported making any of that yet. To turn an atom of lead-204 into an atom of gold-197, you would need to simultaneously knock out 3 protons plus a bunch of neutrons, not just one proton at a time. And if one were to magically create a visible lump of gold-203, it would liquefy before your eyes as it spontaneously decayed into mercury-203. Then your eyes would probably liquefy from all that radiation flying around.
Constructing a piece of gold one atom at a time in a particle accelerator is never going to be an economically viable way to produce gold in bulk quantities. Gold from asteroids, or gold from seawater, will both remain more productive and profitable sources of gold than nuclear transmutation for at least the next dozen millennia.
{edited to fix science: it's 3 protons, not 5}
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Apparently I have been awarded the DPOTD twice.
The process will be massively expensive, so you can make gold at 250,000 an ounce.
Nice experiment but it is meaningless in the real world.
I consider it more likely, though still unlikely in our lifetimes, that a future business will find a way to mine gold from asteroids.
This. It is not cost effective.
The 1950’s TV show “Superman” had an episode where a scientist invented a machine that could create gold, and Superman had to rescue him from the bad guys who kidnapped him and his machine. Afterwards he was explaining to Lois Lane how the machine worked, and he said “To make an ounce of gold you start out with an ounce of platinum (which at the time was worth more than gold) and do ….” when Lois interrupts and says “But that means you lose money!” and he says “Oh yes. I’m just doing this for the Science of it!”
If someone does figure out a way to make lots of gold cheaply, then either they would have to limit the distribution like DaBeers did with diamonds to fix the price high or it would turn into a commodity like what happened with aluminum which was worth more than gold in the 1800’s until they developed the cheap process to refine it.
Mr_Spud
Back to the mine with picks, axes, and shovels. Science and AI can keep trying.
``https://ebay.us/m/KxolR5
We're better off aiming to mine asteroids.
Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value. Zero. Voltaire. Ebay coinbowlllc
Wasn’t there a Twilight Zone episode about that?
what they haven't mentioned... is the amount of other radioactive materials that were likely created in the machine, and the large amounts of energy needed to do the process. Along with the micro amounts created, I don't think there will be any need to be concerned about an oversupply of gold from this method! Just because something can be done.... doesn't mean it 'should' be done, or if it can be done in a economical way.
BWR (boiling water reactors) nuclear power plants routinely create Ag110, but again tiny amounts, and in this case.... it radioactively decays so does not stay around for a long time.
Agree with the more likely dilution of gold supply coming from asteroids, or possibly mars or other planets.
Diamonds are a bit different, though the supply was controlled by Debeers, Governments of other countries don't stockpile diamonds. If there were ever With so many different Governments around the world heavily invested in gold,, there's a substantial incentive to prevent the dilution of supply. At that, it's unlikely we'd ever even know if/when we have started to successfully mine gold from asteroids or another planet. Any whistleblower or company who tried to publicly reveal such a thing would probably get the Epstein/Boeing whistleblower treatment. The way I look at it, any type of asset that the Government has mutual interest in, is generally a safe asset for me to have an interest in
.
Founder- Peak Rarities
Website
Instagram
Facebook
In the hypothetical event of "synthetic gold" entering the market in bulk, or even some other high-supply-high-expense gold source (such as "seawater gold" or "asteroid gold"), there is a core difference between gold and diamonds: gold needs to be heavily refined and processed to be turned into the final product everybody wants, but diamonds don't. Find a diamond in the ground, polish it up, and it's good to go. But there are essentially no places left on Earth where you can walk along and be likely to pick up a bunch of gold nuggets just sitting there on the ground, and even if you do find a gold nugget, it's not going to be .999 pure gold. The ore from even the richest and most productive gold mine has less than half an ounce of gold per tonne of crushed rock, it needs to be heavily refined and processed to acquire anything that resembles a piece of gold.
And the need for that refining process can, in all likelihood, remove or mask any distinctive signature contaminants from the gold that denotes it's origin. After all, .9999 gold is .9999 gold, who would care what the other .0001 is or where it came from?
The things that might become valuable in that far-future era would be any surviving natural gold nuggets, and pieces of gold-veined quartz, or some other rock with gold-bearing mineral veins in it. For such things cannot form from seawater gold, and asteroid gold would have a completely different mineral matrix quite unlike the gold-bearing minerals on Earth. And by that far-future time, almost all the actual mineral gold on earth is likely to have been refined and destroyed.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Apparently I have been awarded the DPOTD twice.
This was originally done 30 or 40 years ago with a slightly different process. It will NEVER affect the gold market because the cost is astronomical.
If they find a way to make gold we are all screwed because there will be no real money anymore and bitcoin will be the only thing left that exists in truly limited supply. Back to tulip bulbs at that point.
Commems and Early Type
250,000 an ounce would be cheap. Accelerator runs cost tens of thousands of dollars. Making even 1000 atoms (10x what the article reports) would give you a cost in the neighborhood of $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 per ounce.
And, no, you can't make the process cheaper because of the huge energy costs involved.
While true, the man-made diamonds have significantly dropped the market price of natural diamonds.
I would guess it's more likely gold will be mined in space before we can hope to produce it in a lab.
"A dog breaks your heart only one time and that is when they pass on". Unknown
Yes, and we could breed a race of genetically modified workers to do the mining for us,,,,, they would need to be bigger,,, stronger,,, dumber,,,,, and have BIG FEET to help them walk easier on other planets.
Yes! A group of thieves (and a scientist who developed a way to one-way travel to the future) steal a bunch of gold and travel to the future with it to escape getting caught. Once they got to the future, they found out that the gold was worthless because man-made gold was very common.
US and British coin collector, and creator of The Ultimate Chuck E. Cheese's and Showbiz Pizza Place Token & Ticket Guide
I’m guessing one day, the alchemist dream will come true.
And the same thing will happen that has occurred with diamonds. Lab grown diamonds are as real as any Diamond ever mined. And can essentially be made to be indistinguishable. Yet, here we are. The mined Diamond trade is still being propped up.
It’s fun to think about the number of lab grown diamonds that have been mixed into the mined diamond trade without disclosure.
Creating a molecular structure (diamond or other gemstone) is far simpler that converting one element into another. That's why they are called elements.
https://www.pcgs.com/setregistry/gold/liberty-head-2-1-gold-major-sets/liberty-head-2-1-gold-basic-set-circulation-strikes-1840-1907-cac/alltimeset/268163
Gold is being created everyday throughout the universe between neutron stars, we could not make any appreciable amount. Bitcoin however is truly man made.
Once belters mine gold from certain asteroids with lots of gold todays gold prices / coins will be in free fall.
Making Gold
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvQcrpGq1y0
A Twilight Zone episode had a bunch of guys steal gold....hide it....go into hibernation....and then awaken in the future when it would appreciate (probably when everybody left the gold standard and fixed pricing of gold
). Of course, they turned on one another and only 1 guy was left at the end. By show's end, we learned that in the future gold was easily man-made and not worth anything. 
I remember the episode because it had Simon Oakland, who I loved as an actor growing up from his many guest appearances on TV shows in the 1960's and 1970's, including KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER.
Yes / They will tank. Game over. Better hurry and take your profits.
I think eventually tech will find a way whether mining from the asteroid belt or some advanced tech mine it in bulk. Sell out now?
The name didn't ring a bell so I looked him up. He was one of the great character actors of the era.
And I think I recall that Twilight Zone episode.
I studied physics. This will never be scalable, it takes absurd amounts of energy. Even if gold became very expensive, and energy very cheap, you could just mine asteroids for gold and other platinum group metals at far lower cost than doing this.
Coin Photographer and Videographer
https://www.youtube.com/@FriendlyEagle7
It would be outlawed, world wide. Most countries have a considerable amount of gold reserves and that would be a threat for sure.
bob
Totally agree. Gold is an element and can't be manufactured from a base metal such as lead without rearranging or otherwise altering the atomic structure of the base metal.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire