[dheera]

I hope that this can one day be scaled, even if 100 years into the future.

I do not want gold to be prized as a store of value. It is too useful as a material (inert, doesn't oxidize, food safe) that it would be vastly beneficial to society if it were possible to produce in limitless quantities.

Pick something that isn't useful as a material to be a store of value.

[andrewflnr]

Basically, pick something with no value as a store of value. If we want to do that, we can just stick with fiat currency in a database. No reason to pick a material.

If we want a physical store of value, I actually think something of use that can easily be subdivided and combined is ideal. It doesn't even have to be as valuable as gold is today, this makes just as much sense if gold is cheap and plentiful. The natural inflation from creating more of it even helps cut down hoarding. It just gets harder to carry around enough to buy coffee (which of course brings us back to databases).

[saghm]

I can't help but worry that the technology wouldn't be enough to solve the way social problem of existing stakeholders not wanting to lose the value of their investments. I'm not sure exactly how comparable it is from a utility perspective, but diamond seems like there would at least some incentive to have available cheaply given how durable it is, but my understanding is that its scarcity is almost entirely artificial, and for non-utility purposes, it seems unfortunately very common for people to prefer "real" diamond, which fuels the inflated pricing.

That's not to say I think this shouldn't be pursued, but I feel like the science and technology side might end up being the easier half of cheap gold from this becoming a reality. I sadly have more faith in humanity's ability to figure out solutions to incredibly difficult technical problems in the long run than I do in our ability to solve the social problems that would benefit almost everyone but require changing the status quo.

(As an aside, I personally find the idea of lab-grown diamonds pretty cool just from a science perspective, and the fact that they're cheaper and don't have the same ethical concerns to make it unfathomable that I'd ever want to purchase a mined one, and I'm lucky that my wife felt the same way when we picked out her engagement ring, although she ended up selecting a lab-grown pink sapphire instead).

[kijin]

There is no scarcity of diamonds for industrial use, only for ornamental use -- and both are equally "real".

An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. Apart from the cost of turning it into a desired shape, gold is entirely fungible. Not so with diamonds, because you can't forge a single 10 ct crystal out of one hundred .1 ct crystals.

So it would seem that lab-grown gold has a better chance of disrupting the market than lab-grown diamonds ever will. Unlike with diamonds, nobody will be able to tell where that gold came from!