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Comment by underlogic | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the type of cheap cut glass you put on a doorhandle. The whole spiel of what an art it is to prepare and how very rare and delicate it is, that's just a scam to get others to overvalue a piece of rock. It also has no utility whatsoever so where they pulled 80k down from 190k from is beyond me. Taking advantage of someone without the reasoning capacity to value a products utility objectively doesn't increase the items market value in reality. I could clean out a retarded person with an overpriced polished apple, but an apple is just an apple and a rock is still a rock. Of course you can at least eat the apple.

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You can say this about almost any art though. The Mona Lisa is just some paint on a canvas.

Objects are valued at what someone is willing to pay for it.

That not correct.

Abundant commodities are valued at the average price a person in the group is willing to pay. This "gemstone" is actually beryl, a very common crystal. What they're trying to do is take this commodity mineral and price it like a scarce object. Paintings so scarce as the Mona Lisa with an available quantity of one are priced at auction to the maximum any person on planet Earth will pay. They actually don't even know how to price it they had to invent a competition to discover the number from the greatest fool in the room. If there were two or eight original copies, the value would nosedive. The scarcity provides the value, not the art.

Since 2010 some shrewd businessmen have decided that pink beryl is a coveted gemstone and marketed it like diamonds. But it's totally worthless, as are diamonds. Similarly cut glass looks the same.

How evil is it to target couples who want to get married and start a family, to then start a marketing campaign and invent a tradition to force them to buy a worthless rock for three months of the groom's salary? I wonder how many expecting working class families had less food on the table because of that.

You've got to be very careful about this kind of thing. Stamp it out. Deviating from utilitarian logic gets perilous right fast. Your unborn children will literally starve

It's an open secret the value of diamonds is all marketing.

GE made the first gem quality diamonds in the 1970s. They can be manufactured in commercial quantities since the 2010s. The largest one so far is 511 karats.

So the diamond industry has to market them as inferior, labeling them "lab grown" and suggests they won't retain their value.

Some people buy things because their beauty pleases them and some buy things to signal to others how much wealth they have. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either. Have you ever bought something that was nicer and more expensive than it needed to be to serve its function?

Utilitarian ideology aside, that rock isn't worth 190k, or 80k or even 1k. It's not that pretty. I'd have a hard time parting with $50 unless I thought I could sell it to someone else tomorrow for more - and there lies the rub. The argument goes that the market sets the value, but this is not a case of that. If one foolish person miscalculates and overpays for an item, the market value for that item doesn't recalibrate to what they paid. There's no market for the item at the new price but that's how these sellers paint it. They pull value from thin air not from scarcity or precision skill but simply by conning the naive. It's a scam plain and simple, wrapped up in superfluous details to sow confusion

Yes, things must provide utility to be worth anything.

Woosh

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