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Comment by DistantCl3ric | Hacker News Reader

Rhino horn is not ivory. Its keratin. Higher value to weight ratio than ivory.

Gotta wonder if it would be better to instead focus on making it easier to source keratin from a bioreactor / cell culture. Crash the market with "counterfeit" rhino keratin which is as good as the real stuff anyhow.

I'd guess that most buyers of objects made from rhino horns are more interested in its rhino horn nature than its keratin composition. If keratin became suddenly abundant, I doubt it'd impact the rhino horn market very much

I know nothing of that market though, could be entirely wrong

I also know nothing of it, it's just a fun thought. In a previous life I really enjoyed faking parking permits and IDs and transcripts and stuff... it would be pretty fun to return to that but this time be one of the good guys: faking rhino horns for the sake of protecting actual rhinos.

But good counterfeits would crash the market. It’s already run by crooks. They’d be happy to cheat.

Then rich Chinese dudes who can't get a boner will demand a video of their rhino being killed and the horn being taken.

Surely that sory of video would be easy to fake if needed these days?

I think being able to produce reliable supply chain traceability is indistinguishable from keeping detailed notes on a criminal conspiracy. None of the players want that besides the consumer. Never happen.

Sure, but it isn't clear to me that China actually cares about stopping rhino poaching, and I imagine the major players in the conspiracy never set foot in South Africa, and just have local low level agents (ie the ones we are told are so poor, they need to poach the rhinos to survive) exposed to consequences.

Buyers aren’t interested in “keratin” - they are interested in “rhino horn”. This is about mystical benefits from phallic animal parts. You aren’t going to tackle the market by fueling it.

Wool is mostly keratin, also hooves and nails.

And feathers, turtle shell, but they are made or another type of keratin.

To be honest, each the keratin of each animal is slightly different, with small changes of the composition, something like plastic that can be made softer or harder tweaking the compostition.

Anyway, I guess it's not about the exact composition, but the "magic" part of the rhino horn.

The great irony is that rhino horns grow back. Poachers would actually make more money in the long term if they didn't kill the rhinos.

> making it easier to source keratin from a bioreactor

Keratin is readily available and cheap

Here's 50g of it on Amazon for $16: https://www.amazon.com/Myoc-Keratin-Powder-Conditioner-Produ...

And you can get it from chemical manufacturers in purer forms for much more expensive but that's true for any high grade chemical.

In fact, if we type your question into Google we find this 2019 article that even references a 2015 article about attempts to do exactly that: https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22723289/3d-printed-rhino-...

I highly suggest googling solutions that you think are rather obvious. It can often lead to surprising results as things can interestingly become complex. And at the worst case, you find that your idea works and you can throw in a citation to give your proposition more weight. Seems like a win win to me and at very little cost in time.

If we could only built a 3d printer that would work with keratin...

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