From Cointelegraph · By Christina Comben
They say all that glitters is not gold, and that took on a completely different meaning this month when a US fusion startup claimed it had produced gold from mercury.
Rather than chemical trickery, Marathon Fusion’s process relies on nuclear transmutation. Its research paper describes how high-energy neutrons from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction can irradiate mercury-198, producing a radioactive isotope that decays into stable gold-197.
So, if gold has what some are calling an “infinite mint bug,” what will happen to the centuries-old metal so revered for its scarcity? And what, if anything, could that mean for Bitcoin as digital gold given it has a hard-capped supply?
Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong sees events playing out in Bitcoin’s favor, and compared the creation of “net-new gold with alchemy” to the lab-grown diamond industry. “But you can’t invent anything that will increase Bitcoin supply,” he said. “There will only ever be 21M.”
Perhaps inspired by the popularity of lab-grown diamonds, Marathon co-founder and chief executive Kyle Schiller tells Magazine he’s been fielding a lot of interest from jewelers.
“We have gotten a shocking amount of interest from people who want to do jewelry,” Schiller says. “As with regular gold, I think it’ll be mostly used as a store of value.”
But before gold bugs start quaking in their boots, Marathon’s achievement is still a long way from proving gold can be produced cheaply at scale.
Nikos Kavalis, managing director at precious metals research firm Metals Focus, tells Magazine, “We are nowhere near a stage where we can talk about production significance.”
“While allusions to alchemical dreams make for great headlines, I think gold miners will get to keep their jobs for the foreseeable future!”
Can gold ever really be manufactured at scale?
The underlying nuclear process is scientifically plausible, but turning it into an economical industrial process is a whole new ball game.
Related: JPMorgan projects Bitcoin to outperform US stocks and gold over next decade
Marathon said it had produced stable gold at a rate 10 times CERN’s record, the European particle physics laboratory where scientists use powerful accelerators to study the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Nuclear fusion turned mercury into gold. Source: Marathon Fusion
But CERN’s ALICE experiment only produced an estimated 29 picograms of gold nuclei during its 2015-2018 run, and those nuclei only existed for fractions of a second before they were destroyed in collisions.
The company hasn’t publicly stated the exact quantity the experiment produced. Marathon research engineer Jake Harter tells Magazine the quantities remain extremely small, “right now still microscopic,” but the company hopes to reach “macroscopic milligram quantities in 2027.”