crankymessiah wrote:
] ] Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups
] ] are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel.
] ]
] ] Next up: the computing industry.
] ]
] ] By Joshua Davis
] ]
] ] Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond up to the
] ] stainless steel jeweler's loupe he holds against his eye.
] ] We are in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingarten's marbled and
] ] gilded living room on the edge of the city's gem
] ] district, the center of the diamond universe. Nearly 80
] ] percent of the world's rough and polished diamonds move
] ] through the hands of Belgian gem traders like Weingarten,
] ] a dealer who wears the thick beard and black suit of the
] ] Hasidim.
] ]
] ] "This is very rare stone," he says, almost to himself, in
] ] thickly accented English. "Yellow diamonds of this color
] ] are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15
] ] thousand dollars."
] ]
] ] "I have two more exactly like it in my pocket," I tell
] ] him.
] ]
] ] He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for
] ] the first time. I place the other two stones on the
] ] table. They are all the same color and size. To find
] ] three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a
] ] coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails.
] ]
] ] "These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much
] ] hope.
] ]
] ] "No, they're real," I tell him. "But they were made by a
] machine
] ] in Florida for less than a hundred dollars."

This is a really great article and one that I had a lot of interest in because of my days at Service Merchandise. Jewelry is a great example of an entire industry that has incredibly healthy profit margins simply due to monopoly. It has interesting parallels with the telecom and computer operating system worlds.

But even more than that, the rise of diamond based computing is something to keep an eye on. This could keep Moore's Law running strong without skipping a beat - something that I've bet against actually. It will take decades before we have usable quantum computing, but this could be the stepping stone.

A new age of Bling Bling