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Comment by akuji1993 | Hacker News Reader

akuji1993

It's going to be interesting if and how you can put a price tag on this. It being the only case of this ever happening in nature, it could have an insane value for the right collector while being worthless to 99% of the world.

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In the case of something so unique, there's a strong argument for it being acquired by a museum so it can be enjoyed widely, and studied by geologists.

It's just a diamond, they are not very interesting unless you believe the TV commercials that tell you they are super important and special. Carbon is carbon.

I'm just laughing at 800 MILLION YEAR OLD ROCK. Like you know how old all the rocks are right?

Classic by now article a must read - “Diamonds are Bullshit”

Here that article was discussed at HN: (7 years ago, 1088 votes)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403988

Umm, yes, they do. They know what layer of rock it was found in and can uranium date the surrounding rocks.

They might, perhaps, be able to date how long it's spent on the Earth, while making wild assumptions about pre-historic conditions that we (by definition) weren't around to observe.

I took it as "really, a rock that is old?!" rather than "they can't know that". But I might have misunderstood.

However this article is about a particularly interesting diamond. Trees aren’t rare, but people travel to see particularly interesting trees and forests.

I wonder if probability theory comes into a valuation like that. Something like, what is the expected value of some whale collector’s valuation. I’d love to be a fly on the wall during whatever auction would be run.

Any pricing theory would fly out the window on something like this: it would purely be driven by the desire to win, for someone rich to have something they can hold against other rich people. It’s a status symbol. The auction would likely be a public English auction so that bidders can know the interest and who’s bidding.

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