> The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks.
Just like the luxury watches market ceased to exist when you could buy quartz watches for 10 bucks.
Just like the luxury watches market ceased to exist when you could buy quartz watches for 10 bucks.
This may have been a nerd-snipe for Harry Potter fans, but I still struggle to interpolate an acccurate word there. "pivot to luxury"?
I'm not sure your analogy has teeth.
And the rest is just a matter of paying for luxury.
The main reason the analogy doesn't really help is that the mechanical watch market absolutely cratered, and it's only being propped up by enthusiasts of cool machines.
Diamonds can't really have that. They've already scammed the general population into using slave diamonds at monopoly prices for 30 years longer than they needed to, but no one is _passionate_ about slave diamonds.
Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
People from India, thailand, Myanmar etc have not and probably won’t for a very long time abandon a strong preference for natural diamonds, regardless of how much “better” the lab grown ones are.
This is a textbook case of “worse is better”.
Yes, that's his point. Quartz watches have eaten the market for "I need a cheap portable time piece", like artificial diamonds did for "I need diamonds for tooling".
Both mechanical watches and natural diamonds have therefore been pushed into a niche market of posers and the easily-influenced, who buy them for different reasons than the mass market.
> Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
No, mined diamonds are inferior for any industrial task due to their flaws and weaknesses.
That analogy doesn't hold for natural diamonds and the comparison therefore falls flat on its face.