> there's little to no difference in quality between the two

Lab grown can be way better quality. To me it was a no-brainer considering the ethical concerns, then add in the cost difference. The only argument I've heard for natural is "I like the imperfections". Sounds like brainwashing to me. They're chemically identical

The mining industry should die

My spouse lost the main stone on their ring. We were able to get another that was twice the size and WAAAY better clarity and quality for about half of the price of the first one.

It's astonishing that it has taken this long to have this kind of impact.

I knew someone who was an economist for a major jewelry company and he said ~15 years ago that the writing was on the wall that lab grown diamonds were going to decimate their sales. He wanted them to start promoting them and be the more ethical and green alternative. He did not last long there.

I am sure the market will be smaller but I don't think it'll go away.

I would segment the "diamond ring" market into two: those who "feel obligated" to give/receive a diamond ring because of peer pressure, and those who genuinely find some meaning in the idea of an expensive engagement token.

Personally I thought I was in group 1 but turns out in my own life I am group two. So it never appealed to me to get a lab ring, and I know my wife would be put off by it. Meanwhile my best friend and his wife got the same size lab stone for somewhat cheaper and are happy with that. Group 1 and that's great.

So yes I agree with you the market will shrink because those who were never inherently interested in a high value stone will all go for lab - but perhaps the diminished supply of natural stones (this story) will keep the value of them higher for those who care.

If anything, much later than what I anticipated it would take. One place where one has to appreciate Chinese scale.

> 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.

there goes their veblen goods...

Nah, they’re pro-De Beers

Given the infamous conditions of diamond mining, to me that reads like “won’t someone think of the jobless slaves?” Someone no longer being forced to slave away in the mines is not exactly a great loss to workers rights.

“De Beers: Because the tears of children make it sparkle!”

At least they aren't blaming millennials still.

so DeBeers just buys up all the labs that grow them and still have a monopoly. Lower the price competition appears and raise the price when competition goes bankrupt. Sort of like Amazon.

Honestly it seems like they knew this would happen, but they managed to really make the most of it. If anything it is an example of how important marketing is in influencing culture and choices

This has been researched for decades, but progress is very slow.

Other wide bandgap semiconductors, i.e. silicon carbide (a.k.a. "moissanite" in jewelry) and gallium nitride are well on their way to make silicon completely obsolete for power semiconductor devices, but they are still many years away from reaching their full potential, in good part because their crystals have still too many defects in comparison with the crystals that can be grown from silicon. Because of too many crystal defects, for now the only commercial SiC devices are MOSFETs and Schottky diodes, despite the fact that SiC thyristors have exceptional properties for working with very high voltages, but bipolar semiconductor devices are much more sensitive to crystal defects, so their mass production is waiting for improvements in crystal growing.

Besides SiC and GaN, there are a few other semiconductors that have greater chances than diamond to become useful for semiconductor devices, e.g. gallium oxide or the sulfides of molybdenum and tungsten.

In diamond, there is not only the problem of crystal defects, but also the currently known dopants have various undesirable properties, like becoming active only at high temperatures, so some diamond electronic devices could be made to work in an oven or on the Venus surface, but not at room temperature.

While the use of diamond as a semiconductor is far in the future and there is no certainty that it will ever become able to replace silicon carbide, if artificial diamonds become cheap enough they might be used much more frequently for heatsinks, including in computers, as the material with the best thermal conductivity.

Diamond heatsinks are already in use, but only in niche applications where price is irrelevant.

Interesting video on the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NLmd5vL0zmk

It would probably last 1,000 years, now.

Since nobody wants to buy them anymore.

That’s not even close to being true.

The did away with child slavery in the mines, but severely exploited female adults instead:

https://www.freedomunited.org/news/botswana-diamonds-ugly-tr...

Things like marital rape are still legal there.

Botswana's diamond mining industry is exactly one company: Debswana, a 50/50 joint venture between the government of Botswana and De Beers.

Which means, when you think about it, that half of one subsidiary of De Beers is effectively producing ~one third of Botswana's GDP. Really puts into perspective how exploitative De Beers is.

Hopefully, the have foreseen this and they have diversified adequately. Relying on a single source for most of your income is never good. Whether that is diamonds or oil. Hopefully they got their own sovereign fund up and running/

Yes. And there are a ton of companies that sell just loose stones, so you can take it to a locally owned shop for the ring and setting, thereby keeping more of the money in your own community.

SEVERELY LIMITED POWER!!!!!

A better target would be the oil and gas industry. When you look at this diamond situation it looks like in approximately one generation, demand for natural diamonds dropped low enough that the effort to mine new diamonds became uneconomical.

This happened because the ease of obtaining lab-grown diamonds that could be much higher quality, made lab-grown diamonds more attractive because buyers, who may already have been squeezed by other unfavorable economic realities found no reason to purchase natural diamonds at a higher price point.

If we could see a shift like that in energy source preference from one generation then perhaps we could destroy the incentive to produce more oil and gas or make it so uneconomical for use a motor vehicle fuel that it became a specialty product that was produced only to supply a niche product line.

We have a similar opportunity now with electric vehicles, solar panels, battery storage, etc that we can make a large dent in the volume of crude oil and natural gas required to power our economies. Developing nations have an advantage in a way because they have less legacy infrastructure to support that requires oil and gas. They can adopt the new big thing and just roll with that saving their citizens lots of money and environmental consequences associated with use of hydrocarbons fuels.

More than 35 years in the oil and gas industry. This is what I learned.

We should invest in developing nations to bring them up to speed with best available technologies. If we waste too much time we will see continents like Africa with 56 (?) nations become a flash-point for the next round of resource wars (oil and gas conflicts) that will be pushed on them by foreign operators attempting to make as much of the O&G money as possible before the world gets the message and abandons their destructive products permanently. We are already seeing some of this today. Millions of lives are in the crossfire. We have an opportunity to make a difference and we should take it. Old and young in developed nations should adopt next-gen tech ASAP so that kill these dino-corps before they kill too many more of us.

If we can replace the taste, appearance, and texture of a medium-rare rib eye with lab grown meat at a substantially cheaper price, we will.

the demand for diamonds is artificial, the demand for meat is very much organic. the only thing stopping most people from consuming more of it is the cost -- driven by demand.

There are a number of efforts to grow vat grown protein. That's producing food without plants even.