Comment by 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!