Will gold’s ‘infinite mint bug’ make Bitcoin more valuable?

A US fusion startup says it has turned mercury into gold. Could a potential increase in the gold supply strengthen Bitcoin’s claim to be a better form of digital gold? They say all that glitters is not gold, and that took on a completely different meaning this month when a US fusion startup claimed it had produced gold from mercury. Rather than chemical trickery, Marathon Fusion’s process relies on nuclear transmutation. Its research paper describes how high-energy neutrons from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction can irradiate mercury-198, producing a radioactive isotope that decays into stable gold-197.