Quote:
Originally Posted by Fusilier
I think diamonds would be useful and in trade, especially in the larger organized cities and regions. In today's world, over 80% of diamonds are used not for vanity, but for industrial purposes. Cutting, abrasives, heat conductors, drilling, electronics, etc...
Salt merchants and sea salt production has been an element within my game.
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Diamonds will only have that value for as long as the electricity, the machine parts, the lubricants and the skilled workers are around to make use of them. To manufacture the items for industrial diamond use requires more infrastructure and resources than will likely be left after the war. However, for someone who has access to these things, their demand for diamonds could make it very profitable for someone to collect them for trade.
Salt becomes valuable simply because it is a necessity for life even without the idea of using it for food preservation or tanning skins etc. And this is a major part of the discussion about things like precious metals and gemstones... if someone believes they are a important, then they will have value. That value is obviously going to be based on how much of a desire there is for the item, how much of it is availalbe and how easy it is to obtain it.
People will make big efforts to recover salt because they know how important it is but will they see the importance in some glassy lumps that look like diamonds when they have no particular use for diamonds?
More importantly, despite what many women will tell you, the majority of people cannot easily tell the difference between real diamonds, diamond-cut crystal, cubic zirconium and diamontes because to really test it you need to conduct test measuring light refraction, heat, adherence of water & oil and the overall lustre. Yes the 'diamonds cut glass' trick does work but there are a number of modern materials such as synthetic sapphires and some new carbon products that will do the same.
About the only sure way for an unskilled person to rule out the others is to use the diamond like a magnifying glass, if it fails dismally at that task, it is more likely to be a real diamond than the other 'gems' mentioned.
Don't think I am rejecting the idea of someone in the post-apocalypse world wanting diamonds (or any other precious metal/stone), it's just that I really do think that for all the trouble it would be to determine whether they are real or fake let alone what they are actually worth will be more trouble than most people would care to indulge in. Without some central group who will underwrite the value of these precious metals/stones and guarantee that they're real, I don't think many people are going to want to take the chance of accepting some shiny glass stones as payment when they can take the shotgun and ten boxes of 12g shells instead.