Why do people pay insane amount for a box copy of Super Mario Bros, a game you can play one pretty much any device. ROM dumps are literary the same data.
I guess rarity is hard to set a price on. And people like being rare and unique.
I guess rarity is hard to set a price on. And people like being rare and unique.
We need to start thinking about jewelry like hi-fi audio. If you just want to listen to good music then lord knows you don't need a $10k setup. You hit diminishing returns really fast and your untrained eye isn't gonna be able to tell the difference between a $500, $2,000, and $10,000 diamond -- they will all be pretty. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do notice and do care.
And even more people who only notice when they're told.
The only thing rare about this big sale is that it’s sealed in the box in perfect condition. All that extra money just for packaging material. Collectors are truly weird.
It's so strange. Buying boxed items with no intention to (ever?) unbox essentially amounts to just paying for the box itself, rather than the contents.
I agree that some people value rarity and uniqueness, but it doesn't look to me like diamonds (natural or otherwise) provide that.
But yes, as I said above, there is value to some people in the rarity and uniqueness of that original, even if you could pump out something that is to all intents and purposes identical.
But diamonds aren't all that rare, the market is managed to restrict supply, even with that everyone and their grandmother has one on their finger. And few people (other than geologists I guess) are really bothered about the back story here. They have an idea about what's "real", and what's not, but that can change.
(I also think where we're just talking about lumps of a material, it's slightly different to a manufactured object, perhaps)
Grown diamonds are too perfect, and it’s trivially easy to tell the difference. You don’t need a loupe at all.
I don’t own any diamonds, but I like rocks and minerals. Hank from breaking bad would be proud.
All of which can either be recreated in a lab now, or are likely to be possible before long. See for example synthetic star sapphires.
> I like rocks and minerals
Good for you, so does my step-dad (he's a geologist). The man was a nightmare to try and drag around the New York museum of natural history, I thought we'd never get out of the mineral section...
It's amazing how powerful the marketing narrative must be for something extremely normie and prescribed to be viewed instead as "rare and unique".