Synthetic gold is coming (short gold, long $BTC/crypto). Similar to (cheap) lab-grown diamonds, costing up to 80% less than "real" diamonds to produce/mine, gold will likely become much cheaper to produce/mine in the next 5 years due to breakthroughs in fusion techniques. "...new scalable method to synthesize stable gold from the abundant mercury isotope using (n, 2n) reactions in a specialized neutron multiplier layer of a fusion blanket." Source: