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De Beers has been working for years to develop techniques to identify lab made diamonds. It's extremely difficult as lab grown diamonds are identical to flawless diamonds.

It seems they are taking another route, predatory pricing.

I don't know how they've gotten away with such blatant market manipulation for so long.

DeBeers will give you all sorts of fud saying that they will eventually have a process for telling the difference between the two, but they won't. Ever.

Read their Industry scheme for regulation. Note the phrase "Not to buy any diamonds from suspect or unknown sources of supply". That's all about market control.

Before the "Kimberly Process", diamonds were generally bought and sold, even in DeBeers showings, with no indication of origin. So introducing synthetic diamonds into the market was easier. With the "Kimberly Process" in place, it's much tougher.

The diamond industry has been lobbying countries to require that synthetic diamonds be labelled in some way. The term "cultured diamonds" is widely used, but there's litigation in Germany to require some more negative term, like "synthetic".

DeBeers has also developed identification devices, the DiamondSure and the DiamondView to try to sort out synthetic and natural diamonds. The diamonds produced in high-pressure presses can be identified without much trouble. But grown diamonds are tougher to identify.

Long term, diamond prices will probably crash, like sapphire did once you could buy sapphire bar, tube, and rod.

Read their Industry scheme for regulation. Note the phrase "Not to buy any diamonds from suspect or unknown sources of supply". That's all about market control.

Before the "Kimberly Process", diamonds were generally bought and sold, even in DeBeers showings, with no indication of origin. So introducing synthetic diamonds into the market was easier. With the "Kimberly Process" in place, it's much tougher.

The diamond industry has been lobbying countries to require that synthetic diamonds be labelled in some way. The term "cultured diamonds" is widely used, but there's litigation in Germany to require some more negative term, like "synthetic".

DeBeers has also developed identification devices, the DiamondSure and the DiamondView to try to sort out synthetic and natural diamonds. The diamonds produced in high-pressure presses can be identified without much trouble. But grown diamonds are tougher to identify.

Long term, diamond prices will probably crash, like sapphire did once you could buy sapphire bar, tube, and rod.

The music industry is less than 100 years old. Their need is gone, yet believe it or not music will survive without them.

Or will it? As long as the incumbent music publishers hold copyrights on almost every possible melody, this will still create a chilling effect against production of music outside of the license-pooling in-group called the "music industry".

Just like diamonds are a new facet of love, love predated the need to pay "2 months salary" for a love rock, and love will keep going after the diamond industry.

Damn right. The diamond mining industry has about until the 2020s, when Apollo Diamond's patents on chemical vapor deposition will begin to expire, and competition will drive down the price of diamond to compete with cubic zirconia. However, unlike patents on diamond production, copyrights on popular music don't expire.

On further investigation, their on website says the DeBeers Trading Group is based in London, but the corporate headquarters are in Johanesburg. Go figure :)

Let's /. De Beers

Well, with 6 month sales of over $3bn posted on Monday, I'm sure they can take it.

De Beers results here. (pdf document).

There is a single company, De Beers, which apparently owns a tremendous percentage of the world's diamond supply, and, I have heard, artificially props up the price by heavily restricting what goes out into the world.

From what I heard, if it wasn't for this company strangling the market, diamonds would be worth MUCH MUCH less than they are currently.

I guess in recent years, diamonds have been discovered to be much more plentiful than we thought.

de beers