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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

There many videos on Youtube by hobbiests who frequent the park. It is back breaking work. The park rangers rightly prevent any modern, or even hobbiest, mining automation.

> was encouraged to keep the stone in its rough form—no polishing, no cutting. “It’s a beautiful chocolate diamond,” Kinard says. “It’s a nine-carat diamond. Those are very rare, and very hard to come by.

It might not be worth very much. Diamonds are not rare, are not particularly beautiful when uncut. The valuable diamonds are the diamonds that can be cut to produce a flawless gem.

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There are _a lot_ of places in Australia that are the same but with gold.

You can pretty much drive an hour of out Sydney or Melbourne to some rivers and turn the soil and make up to minimum wage extracting river gold, but you can't run a motor doing it or use any equipment that is larger than what you can carry.

A lot of independent mining is like that - it's borderline low wage work but with the promise of a lotto ticket sprinkled in to keep you working.

For a second I thought you were describing Silicon Valley and startup equity.

I’ve also heard that if you’re good enough at poker you can grind away and make minimum wage at casinos in Vegas.

I'd guess that's probable. Limit Hold-em is pretty mechanistic. If you play perfectly, it's pretty likely that other people at your table won't, so you'll probably turn a profit over time. The only loss is the house rake, which wasn't that much last time I played.

A close friend has been doing wet sifting at Crater of Diamonds for years. Low wage work with the promise of a lotto ticket sprinkled in is exactly how I would describe it. This article felt like a very long ad.

> The valuable diamonds are the diamonds that can be cut to produce a flawless gem.

Though note that those aren't rare either. A diamond has no resale value; jewelers already have all the diamonds they're allowed to sell.

You can't resell diamonds at retail price of course, but diamonds are in fact priced by the market at wholesale. The DeBeers monopoly, if there ever was one, is decades old.

Source: Worked at a diamond wholesaler for years, sat next to the owner as he bought, measured, evaluated diamonds.

It's funny that the narrative for years was "DeBeers cornered the market to create fictional high prices." I believed it myself. Most right-thinking people outside the diamond industry did.

With Russian and Canadian mines coming online over the past two decades it's become clear that they cornered the market to keep prices stable. Volatility has gone through the roof but diamonds haven't become genuinely cheap.

In retrospect this should have been obvious. Cornering the market completely for 80 years would have been impossible if diamonds weren't still pretty rare.

It makes me wonder what other myths I have kicking around my head.

Yeah, its in one sense true - diamonds are common, there's no shortage of diamonds for drill bits, etc. But gem grade diamonds are rare, especially big ones.

Relative of retired jewelry store owner here: The idea of Jewelry having any type of considerable value has got to be the biggest snow job scam ever played on the middle class throughout all history. Jewelry has absolutely no utility value at all except to impress people who are easily fooled. All gemstones of any known utility can be created cheaply and flawlessly in a laboratory. If you are considering 1-5k on a wedding ring and you have less than $5 million in the bank, you might as well start opening those Nigerian prince emails and pass some donations that way too because the result is the same and the Nigerian scammers probably need it more than the jewelry store owners. If your potential significant other is angry at you for not buying an expensive wedding ring, run away. They have some core judgement issues or they place 0 value on the effort it takes you to make the money needed to buy that ring.

There is some amount of value in the custom made stuff (as in your own design/idea). It is hard and skilled work to craft metal so fine. But otherwise agreed. The culture of absurd spending for marriage needs to end as well. That money could go towards a house which will provide a lot more happiness in your life.

> they place 0 value on the effort it takes you to make the money needed to buy that ring.

Very well said. I grew up in a middle-middle class family in India, and my Mom would not have let my Dad buy her any jewellery with his hard earned money.

On the other hand my father let my Mom buy a few grams of gold every few months. It was a good decision in hindsight considering how much it grew over the past few decades. My Mom's gold came to rescue when my family was in financial distress.

I don’t know what the logistics are of wherever and whenever you grew up, but I would expect a slew of better diversification options for anyone in the developed world in the form of low cost index etfs.

Gold’s performance has been quite subpar for the past few decades.

I like that the "Esperanza" diamond is supposed to have a price of $1M, or even more, and if you follow the rabbit hole the owners have been trying to sell the stone since 2015 to no avail (https://gemblog.igi.org/the-esperanza-diamond-is-still-for-s...). They even plugged in a saffire in...

The more you read about diamonds, the more they sound like a scam to sell overpriced wedding rings.

In what I must assume is a case of unintentional candor, the pendant it’s mounted on is shaped like a bear trap!

(See the meaning of “bear trap” in both the hunting and financial sense)

> The more you read about diamonds, the more they sound like a scam to sell overpriced wedding rings.

That is because they are. There are much better ways to signal whatever people used to signal by buying diamonds, at least on the higher end of the wealth scale. Not least because you can just get a synthetic diamond and no one can tell the difference, so now they try to sell “stories” behind it to create artificial scarcity.

I read once that a (cheap) cubic zirconia is difficult to tell apart from a diamond, unless you have a sharp eye and know exactly what you are looking for: if you propose with a zirconia, your wife will not notice unless she tries to sell the thing. Diamond sellers would tell you otherwise, telling that "zirconia has no fire inside", while others say exactly the opposite.

As fishy as all of that market smells, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of diamond buyers are getting CZ or moissanites for their money.

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