You get cents on the dollar. Even or I should say especially brand names like Tiffany.
The whole thing is a scam from start to finish and I wish I could go back in time and avoid the entire thing.
Does that mean you can buy one second-hand at a low price, and avoid the inflated market entirely?
Edit: I checked and multi diamond cluster rings look way more impressive and make single diamond rings look cheap and icky.
Similar to not buying clothing from someone deceased or a wedding dress from someone divorced.
Can argue that this is not very rational. But much about the wedding process isn't :)
That's why your shop should only sell the weddings rings from people who had a long and successful marriage and died peacefully in their sleep at age 95.
A 60 year marriage, ended by death of one spouse shouldn't be unlucky. Especially if it was actually the death of both spouses in some tragically romantical way.
Don't underestimate the power of superstition.
"Diamonds are forever". Yeah, they are - because once you buy it, you can't really sell it to break even, let alone make a profit. Gold has natural market price fluctuations at least.
But actual diamond jewellery is mostly priced like artwork. The worth of the actual separate components has very little to do with the price of the item.
Lots more here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38246406
Unknown quality ~6.5 mm second-hand lab-grown diamond : $0.8k :
https://louped.com/lab-grown-diamond114927.html
High quality ~6.5 mm new lab-grown diamond : $1.2k :
https://www.whiteflash.com/loose-diamonds/lab-created-diamon...
----
Crappy ~6.4 mm second-hand natural diamond : $3k :
https://louped.com/gia-certified-round-diamond-114841.html
https://www.freediamondreport.com/report/lab/GIA/cert/545639...
High quality ~6.5 mm new natural diamond : $3.5k-3.9k :
https://www.whiteflash.com/loose-diamonds/round-cut?carat=0....
(Clarity doesn't seem to matter that much, because it has not much effect as long as it can't be seen to the naked eye, which in these except the worst one it probably won't be ? https://beyond4cs.com/clarity/ )
That said there’s really no reason to buy new unless it’s a custom made piece.
From a resource utility PoV it costs more to source than copper or aluminium which are nearly as conductive - so they win out for electronic and power transmision applications.
There are applications where gold is the clear winner - "forever" circuits and switches that are worth the extra cost to have contacts that never corrode, space tech, etc.
But the reality is that the vast vast majority of gold mined gets turned into bullion and horded (my precious!!) or played with a little and worn as jewellry.
I've been in and around the gold mining industry for decades, I'm not a hater - but it's easily one of the most valuable useless things we spend vast amounts of energy on gathering.
if you're part of a culture that values gold then gold has percieved value .. otherwise it's not especially useful
(in that other elements have similar properties and are cheaper to bulk source, with few applications that benefit uniquely from gold).
'Useful' being the pragmatic sense, food, shelter, clothing are neccesary, concrete and steel are useful, copper is useful, gold is (mainly) hoarded and shown off.
The electrical conductivity of copper is slightly higher at 5.96 x10^7 S/m than gold which is 4.11×10^7 S/m. More importantly is the lifespan of the two metals. Copper has a high oxidation level. So, if installed in an unstable environment (such as outside), it will fail sooner than gold.
/s
Isn't it "hoarding" (acquiring an excessive number of items and storing them in a chaotic manner)?
But either way, 1/2 a trillion is just 1/8th of the yearly federal budget. Not sure it is an amount that matters much to the government.
Put another way, if we look at all the parallel realities of Earth, even prior to the discovery of gold, I suspect the overwhelming majority of them would end up using it as a major store of value. It's just really perfect for it! We may even find alien civilizations, assuming a comparable elemental distribution to Earth, doing the same!
In exchange for all that, you get a physical object that can be lost, damaged, or stolen.
If you're going to invest in gold, it seems like a poor way to do it.
From people that I observed over the years I saw people who had low self esteem mostly that would pull up with loads of jewelry.
There are also people who like it as small accents but I don't think they do it because it is worth something but more like they just like it and that's fine.
It rains diamonds on Neptune.
Naomi Rowe-Gurney: So I mentioned methane being the reason why these two planets are blue. Well, methane has carbon in it and that carbon can occur by itself and also be crushed by the immense pressures that happen, like, deep in the atmosphere, so much deeper than the levels that I look at. And inside the planet, when it gets really hot and really dense, these, these diamonds form and accumulate, and then they become even heavier. And that means that they kind of rain down in the atmosphere. But it’s not the rain that we see here because these pressures are extreme, and you’ll never be able to get there as a human. So even if these diamonds do exist, we would never be able to go and grab them. So… unfortunately.
https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-...
Closer to a mesospheric cloud?
All of that nonsense is long gone; the fetish for engagement rings is just a residual and empty metaphor. Good riddance.
My US gf was astonished and dubious that my relatives (in various other countries) didn't have diamond engagement rings, or engagement rings at all.
How an Ad Campaign Invented the Diamond Engagement Ring
In the 1930s, few Americans proposed with the precious stone. Then everything changed.
This is likely a legend.
Meanwhile the government is simply providing some infrastructure as a service to people who want to make such commitments.
Hot take: Diamonds are scams, don't buy them! Take a trip, buy a house, start an investment account instead.
You do realise that in the (admittedly unlikely) event of that needing to be cut off, you won't stand a chance?
Example: https://youtu.be/eKxUYvKR-jw