Could Mercury-to-Gold Transmutation Boost Bitcoin's Value Proposition?
Marathon Fusion, a fusion technology startup based in the United States, reports successful transmutation of mercury into gold. If the precious metal supply could potentially expand, would this enhance Bitcoin's position as superior digital gold?
The old adage warns us that all that glitters is not gold, but this phrase acquired an entirely new interpretation recently when a United States fusion technology company made headlines by announcing it had successfully created gold from mercury.
Instead of relying on chemical manipulation, the methodology employed by Marathon Fusion is based on nuclear transmutation. The company's published research paper details how neutrons carrying high energy levels from a fusion reaction involving deuterium and tritium can bombard mercury-198, generating a radioactive isotope that subsequently decays into gold-197, which is stable.
Therefore, if the precious yellow metal possesses what critics are dubbing an "infinite mint bug," what consequences await the ancient metal that has been treasured for its rarity across the centuries? Additionally, what implications, if any, might this hold for Bitcoin in its role as digital gold, considering it features a supply that is hard-capped?
Brian Armstrong, who serves as chief executive at Coinbase, envisions circumstances unfolding to Bitcoin's advantage, and drew parallels between generating "net-new gold with alchemy" and the industry producing lab-grown diamonds. "But you can't invent anything that will increase Bitcoin supply," he said. "There will only ever be 21M."
Possibly drawing inspiration from the rising popularity of laboratory-created diamonds, Kyle Schiller, who co-founded Marathon and serves as its chief executive, informs Magazine that his company has been receiving substantial interest from the jewelry sector.
"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."
However, before enthusiasts who collect gold begin experiencing serious concern, it's important to note that Marathon's accomplishment remains considerably distant from demonstrating that gold production can occur cost-effectively at an industrial scale.
Nikos Kavalis, who holds the position of managing director at Metals Focus, a precious metals research firm, informs 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 nuclear process that serves as the foundation is scientifically sound, but transforming this into an economically viable industrial operation represents an entirely different challenge.
Marathon announced it had generated stable gold at a production rate 10 times higher than the record set by CERN, the European particle physics laboratory where researchers utilize powerful accelerators for studying the fundamental components of matter.
However, CERN's ALICE experiment generated only an estimated 29 picograms of gold nuclei throughout its operational period from 2015 to 2018, and these nuclei existed merely for tiny fractions of a second before being destroyed through collisions.
The precise quantity that the experiment yielded has not been disclosed publicly by the company. Jake Harter, a research engineer at Marathon, informs Magazine that the amounts remain extraordinarily small, "right now still microscopic," though the company anticipates achieving "macroscopic milligram quantities in 2027."
Consequently, the significantly larger figures presented in Marathon's research paper represent projections for a hypothetical future fusion power facility, not current actual output.
The research paper models annual production of approximately two tonnes of gold for each gigawatt of thermal fusion power. For perspective, the World Gold Council reports that on a global basis, mining operations produced 3,672 tonnes of gold in 2025, meaning a single prospective fusion facility's output would represent a modest contribution by comparison.
To even achieve those projected targets, Harter explains the company would need to scale up production of the enriched mercury required for gold production, and naturally it would need to construct the actual fusion reactor.
"In the process of maturing this technology, we'll also be working on studies demonstrating materials compatibility, mercury pumping and gold extraction," he says.
Could gold follow the lab-grown diamond playbook?
Drawing comparisons like those made by Armstrong between Marathon's nuclear-produced gold and laboratory-grown diamonds seems almost inevitable. Wholesale pricing for lab-grown diamonds has plummeted by over 90% since 2018 as manufacturing has expanded. In contrast to earlier diamond alternatives like cubic zirconias, the newer laboratory-created diamonds possess a chemical composition that is identical to mined diamonds while costing a fraction of the price. Might the same trajectory occur with gold?
In the view of Nagham Hassan, who works as a market analyst at eToro, an investment platform, the comparison drawn with laboratory-grown diamonds makes sense, but "the economics are completely different."
While diamond manufacturing became less expensive as production facilities achieved greater scale, she explained that generating gold via nuclear fusion "would require highly complex infrastructure that does not yet exist commercially."
An additional complication involves the fact that the gold produced through this process would contain radioactivity.
"The gold would need to be stored for a bit over a decade before dropping to banana-levels of [radio]activity," Harter says, although, given that most gold is "just stored as an investment," he does not view this as a significant obstacle to earlier commercialization.
A more substantial problem concerns the uncertainty around whether the economic factors will ever be favorable.
"There is no demonstration that the process is commercially viable," Kavalis says. "There are theoretical revenue projections, but nothing about what it will cost to run the reactors."
Would Bitcoin benefit if gold became less scarce?
Bitcoin frequently receives the description of digital gold due to its supply being constrained by protocol rules and limited to a maximum of 21 million, but Armstrong contends that nobody can devise a method to manufacture additional future coins.
Should a future technology such as nuclear fusion create an alternative source of gold supply, this could theoretically exert downward pressure on the commodity's price.
"For any asset, a substantial increase in available supply would, other things being equal, put downward pressure on its market price," Fabian Schär, professor of distributed ledger technology and fintech at the University of Basel, tells Magazine.
"Under the hypothetical assumption of inexpensive production at scale, gold would be no exception."
Yet with the earliest fusion reactors estimated to arrive at least a decade into the future, and numerous questions persisting regarding the economic feasibility of this novel form of alchemy, it seems unlikely to provide Bitcoin prices with a boost in the near term.
Therefore for the present moment, at minimum, the work being conducted by Marathon represents more of a captivating scientific experiment with potentially intriguing applications rather than representing an immediate threat to gold market stability.
Peter Schiff and his associates can relax and breathe easier.