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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zombie_Babies" data-source="post: 6268289" data-attributes="member: 6750039">Sure you can.  How many diamonds on the market, though, do you think have gone through that analysis?  The way that you can gauge how many blood diamonds are coming through, though, is by the stone's recorded place of origin.  In some areas diamonds are only found in rivers and the process to find them is labor intensive, low tech as hell and not efficient.  Countries typically produce roughly the same amount of stones annually so when you see one of these low volume countries suddenly spiking to ten times production, well, it's a safe bet that they're taking on stones from neighboring areas that are on the no-no list.  And guess what these countries do: They certify these illegal stones as legal since they're a signatory nation and the stones - technically speaking - come from them.  Like I said, it's incredibly easy to fake and incredibly difficult to prove.  Too much money in it for these poor nations to stop, too.Re: DeBeers: They set the market cuz they buy the most stones.  At one point they had just about all of the available stuff out there.  Russia, though, invited some countries to showcase their mining equipment in a diamond mine.  Once things were moving along swimmingly, they booted everyone that wasn't Russian out, took the equipment and stones and threatened to blow up DeBeers' spot by flooding the market with cheap stones cuz, you know, diamonds aren't really rare at all.  Someone mentioned why this didn't happen.Anyhoo, there's major diamond sales annually and the major players buy.  Once they do, they hold onto the stones and release them slowly in order to maintain demand.Oh, what is getting more rare are large diamonds.  The big mines like The Kimberly (Big Hole) use huge ass gear to mine as much as possible as fast as possible.  They pull diamonds out of stone by way of a massive rock crusher.  This crusher, incidentally, has the power to break up the bigger gems.</blockquote>

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