A fusion startup claims to have found a way to turn mercury into gold.

Marathon Fusion, a fusion startup, recently made a surprising announcement (technical details here) about an unusual potential revenue source: alchemy. The backstory: your reactor needs a blanket of some element that will slow down neutrons. As these neutrons encounter atoms of whatever that element happens to be, they turn it into a potentially-unstable isotope of that element, and that isotope decays into something else. It turns out that one of the viable isotopes to choose for this is 197Hg, which decays into 197Au. Which is a lot more interesting if you paraphrase it as "fusion reactors can turn enriched mercury into slightly radioactive gold, which, after 6.8 years, will be in the least hazardous nuclear waste category. (If you wait 17.7 years, a troy ounce of gold produced this way is less radioactive than a banana and doesn’t require any labeling.)[3] Of course, there's a lot of ground to cover between "this works in theory" and actual gold production. But it's interesting to consider the hypothetical.

Peter Schiff in disarray:

This level of output would require 100-400 tons of mercury in a magnetic confinement fusion device, which could produce three tons of gold per year. At current wholesale prices, 525MW of power produces about $266m of revenue, assuming high but not 100% utilization. The gold component is $320m. So, all else being equal, fusion can produce around 120% more revenue per megawatt of capacity through its sideline of alchemy.

Which Bitcoiner is gonna fund this and really wreck the gold bugs?

Will crypto true believers start massively subsidizing the fusion industry in order to eliminate the one big competitor in the "quasi-currency with low-and-predictable inflation" niche? Or will gold producers decide to beat them to the punch by pouring money into quantum computing?

Also this:

(If anything, it's arguably more valuable than regular gold, because it's more inconvenient to steal [because it's radioactive for 6 years].)