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You could also carve a private key into amber (a fossilized resin) which has preserved insects, sometimes for millions of years. Sadly if heated above 200 °C (392 °F), amber suffers decomposition, but I doubt it weathers as badly as stone. Here's a picture of an ant preserved in amber.

http://s2.postimg.org/m56nzzut5/Amber2.jpg

I suppose you have already heard of Mr. Bitcoin but I think this is the future of bitcoin storage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9HcFxTM8hI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9HcFxTM8hI)

Well your smart phone supports nfc technology so your kids could get your secret stash any time they want when you are gone without having to use the kitchen knife  ;D Anyways I would prefer some small chip than the need to lug around hardware wallets. I do fancy the idea we will be carrying the blockchain in our bodies in the not-so-distant future  8)

Like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=767955.msg8655017#msg8655017

Charlie Shrem engraved a private key onto a ring: http://www.wired.com/2013/03/bitcoin-ring/

That needle looks big! :o I wouldn't do it. I wonder if this thing is vulnerable to EMP or strong magnetic field? What if the carrier gets tased?

You are on the right track i to had these thoughts and i finished up when i remembered something from school 20years previously we dug a hole and buried a time capsule.

You could in grave a stone deeply and then place it in a time capsule 'steel casing' and then it is as safe as can be from anything and everything for as long as needed.

Personally I don't think that you will be in need of bitcoin wallet in a say, 100 years. Not that you will be long dead, thats too. But I think as for technology
it is safe to assume that bitcoin will be upgraded to the point old private keys would be obsolete and not needed anymore. It will happen sooner or later,
with bitcoin 2.0 release.

Woah, thats sick and crazy. If someone would want to rob you, he would cut this from you with knife.... even more sick.
This is really bad idea, i would prefer amber :P

Houses don't last. I regularly see old ones being demolished with apartments buildings replacing them. So I suggest you build a pyramid atop of the stone in your basement where you've carved your private key. This is time-proven, I've never seen anyone demolishing a pyramid.

But you gonna need quite a lot of big stones.

So are you saying that quasi-immortality isn't even going to happen, or are you just saying that current young BTC holders will not be rich enough to afford it?

1) Tattoo password/phrase on taint 2) Implant under skin containing encrypted private key or wallet in armpit

Put in your will that you are to have an autopsy and where to look.

I don't know about stone but I prefer metal. Even at high temperatures like fire which goes over few thousand degrees when it is burning, stones or even concrete for that matter will be reduced to rubble. It's the same for metal as well which will probably melted and if only one of the characters were missing, it will be very difficult to recover. Still cracking my head on what is the best solution though. 

I am afraid that you can't be and you wouldn't be so rich with bitcoins alone. Bitcoin is not independent enough. It is being manipulated easily by whales.
Do you think that 'old money' would allow bitcoin to spread and gain more value in the future? No, they would probably buy good amount of coins and will be (already are) manipulating market.

If you like metal but are concerned about heat, have you considered implementing a MultiSys (multi-solar system) solution?

Why are people concerned about >100 year storage. you can just renew your metal wallet/paper wallets once they lose some of their qualities.

Consider engraving your private key into a block of tungsten

http://we.lovebitco.in/img/tungsten.jpg

With a melting point of 3422 °C if would be the only thing left if your house burn down.
And with approximate same density as gold, the block is rather heavy to pick up and run away with.

I would love to see this. Sweet idea.

and therefore super easy to hide :p

Imagine smuggling some of those around in your ass if you have more than one address.

It does not have to be big like that block in a picture. We are talking here about longevity of said bitcoin key its preservation for the future.
We have no concerns about its safety when someone decide to steal it. If you want to keep it safe just dig it somewhere or deposit in a bank vault or something.

Okay, so that model was just for ppl w/ really big asses then. I'll take the small ass version.

Ohh, I did not realize this requirement.

In that case you might want to look into "Chip gratify".

http://spectrum.ieee.org/images/public_html/tech_talk/owlz.jpg

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/images/mistert.jpg

This has been know since the dawn of microchips, if you as a chip designer have some free real estate on the silicon, then is there room for "artistic structures", this could just as well be a QR code with the private key.

I am confident that this should last for at least 100 years and fit into most rectums.

Carved the key to a stone, and snap it into two pieces. Maybe your son hold one of them and moved to another country. Your daughter holding one in US. One day, they finally met each other, then they claim your coins. Sorry I was thinking about a movie ...not bitcoin

It's a good idea to store your private key for long term, like centuries, but you do not need to carve it into real stone, you can carve it into some clay, and then burn the clay into stone, that's easier, lol

Do multisig and carve it into a Great Pyramid, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, the Kaaba they circle around in Mecca, and the Yellow Emperor's tomb. This is a real opportunity for you to make the claiming of your coins a real-life Indiana Jones adventure. Even if it's like 1 BTC.

storing them in some ancient pyramid(carved on some stone inside) would be really cool lol, or maybe inside a mummy's sarcophagus

would be original indeed

By the way I may sound like a crazy person but has anyone tried to actually memorize their private key? Like the only trace of your bitcoins is in your head  8)

I read 1/2 year ago about a user who has had completely memories his private key, took him about 2 weeks of training.
I think with methods like "memory mapping", where you visualize the different numbers and characters at different locations in a house you know very well,
it can be done fairly easy. However I don't like the idea about not having a backup (even your brain needs a back up).
All my (important) private keys are located at least two places on two different mediums.

expect to be have more knowledge and skills with age--and perhaps be cooler--but also expect to notice some degree of cognitive decline.

and then you need an electron raster microscop to read the QR codes?

Speaking of keys, I'm pretty sure we've just unlocked the key to gaining mass adoption. We just need to get everyone started with electron raster microscopes

I see what you did there ;)

Just for the info of anyone trying to sweep it:

1fu1UkeMdZZjZeWktKobPWJAACWJZYJ1o

5JjP3pJpmzRWWB1me6423kFAHgX5DpcQA75zbPryeAPritoKt2e

Did you really take the time to enter that priv key into bitaddress.org?

This is fantastic. Not to mention the delicious irony - StateOfTheArt Meets The Stone Age.

Got Chisel?

Lol, actually an USB pendrive with your bitcoin wallet.dat file inside an amber fossil would look really cool.

But isn't very secure. Most people lose their keys/wallet sometimes in their live.

Wow, very cool. I like the idea of tungsten. It would be great if there is something like a hatch that will cover up the private keys and also coupled with a lock. That would actually hide the keys and if need to, will have to open up the lock in order to be able to see the characters inside. I imagine with a whole block like that nobody could be able to cart it away

Yeah it would be better if it had some sort of sealable cover (tamperproof maybe?) or a thick metal lid with a combination lock.

I'd imagine a lump of tungsten like that would cost a lot of $$$ to buy and engrave.

LOL someone have just funded the tungsten block  :D
https://blockchain.info/tx/aae16dc871f241269b516033b2783d4ab41c20494a3b5e6d4b2d440fadab12da

Ferro Tungsten is 32.93 USD/kg. It's been dropping in price since 2012 according to this chart. I don't know how much it would cost to engrave though. That infomine link gives a range of short term and long term price charts for metals.


http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/ferro-tungsten/

http://s9.postimg.org/j4naqpuz3/chart.png

I think it could be a cool wallet, 10 Kg, $330.
Obviously you need to find a method how to engrave the letters yourself...

For a house owner, could it be cool to make a tungsten block the same size as a brick and replace a brick from the inner wall with the tungsten block. 

Engraved Tungsten ring?  I would never trust an engraver with my private key though. 

I would consider having them carve a Bip-32 password protected address.

http://lghttp.26432.nexcesscdn.net/80B730/media/media/catalog/product/cache/1/small_image/163x/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/a/n/angels_ring.jpg

Wow that's a lot cheaper than I thought, might consider getting one made as long as the engraving isn't too pricey.

Something like this would be pretty cool, just scaled up and a bit more polished:


http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1406/5183170213_62d4a7cda2.jpg

I'm not so keen on stone or tungsten or tattoos. At some point an emergency may necessitate you accessing the keys and then you're stuck with a full sized pyramid to get rid of, let alone a passing tunneler arriving in your basement and reading them.

A more dependable and secretive technique would be to breed a strain of miniature horses that could pick out the private keys with a ouija board if they sniffed your DNA or that of your descendants. If they were trained well enough the muscle memory of the private key would pass from generation to generation.

We used to preserve insects in a plastic resin, when we were still in school... You could encapsulate your stone carving into a plastic resin for double protection.  ;D

I think a 100 years from now, Bitcoin would be a distant memory.... We will have some sort of payment method linked to your DNA and payment will be done with your brain waves and little Nano robots.  ;D

We will all be "dust" by then... Bitcoin will be the least of our worries.  ;)

I don't mean to be rude and I respect your opinion.
But that that comment unfortunately shows that you have not realized what part of the bitcoin technology that is revolutionary and most likely will go into the history books as the greatest invention since the Internet. Cheers :)

Why not engrave it onto a slab of gold? It may have a lower melting point than tungsten, but it would surely cover for your loss if Bitcoin was to hit the ground.

Tungsten has better long term preservative properties than gold
When that is said, then is my opinion that gold is one of the solid commodity investments you can make right now.
I would not be surprised to see gold @ $2000/Oz within the next 5-10 years.

Good points raised.  High value metals seem to be good investments to make a pretty decent return on it.
Would Palladium and Platinum be good replacements for gold? Maybe not Platinum as I know it's malleable. I can't find anything on Palladium.

Both Platinum and Palladium are precious metals and are rather expensive, Platinum is at $1134 and Palladium is at $773 (50 times more expensive than Silver).
Palladium is much harder than gold but less hard than tungsten.
I don't see any special properties for Palladium that makes it a great bitcoin wallet (other than it is nice and shiny, but tungsten can be made shiny too).
Then you might as well use steel, it only cost a fraction of the price.

Side note:
Both Platinum and Palladium are good commodity investments as well, but I believe gold has greater potential.
But there is something special about Platinum, hard to explain, but the coins I have seen in Platinum just make the same wow impression as gold coins.
 

They may be expensive but I still feel as if it may cover your potential losses if you bought bitcoin and it crashed. I'll assume that you won't keep your keys on the block of tungsten only as it still can be lost. If you're going to have multiple backups of the keys why not just go full out and try maximize your profits. The only thing I still find to be a problem is the malleability of the metals.

That's a bit paranoid don't you think? If you have a couple of hard drives and usbs they should last enough years before a single one fails. As one fails make a new backup. This way you will never lose them.

You should always have a physical copy of your keys somewhere. What if you decide one day you want to check all drives are doing fine, so you plug them into your computer and they become corrupted or infected with some sort of malware/ransomware. Having a physical copy can save you greatly.

Here's a quicker more cheaper way: print your paper wallet private key and put it inside a plastic safe from moisture and degradation. It should resist for your lifetime.

I'm still voting for the chisel in rock, but rock, tungsten or amber - ALWAYS have back-ups in separate locations. You could even put HALF your key in one place - and the other half someplace else.

It is! But it's a pretty time consuming process! You may want to carve some Electrum seed into the stone and sign messages for the respective addresses from an offline machine, that way you're completely safe!

When we talk about long time curation, then is this not a great idea, its actually a terrible idea, since you will also need to consider the aspects of digital curation.
You will need to include meta data in the stone how the seed should be read and understood, this will be quite substantial, much more data than the seed itself.
You cannot assume that a compatible version of the required software can just be "downloaded" 100 years from now, actually, you cannot be sure the term download even exist.
It is reasonable to assume that the Latin alphabet exist 100 years from know, therefor can the key be preserved with reasonable chance by carving that into the stone in raw format with latin letters,  if any thing more than the raw key is carved, then will you also need to include meta data. Data curation is actually much more complicated then one might think at first glimpse.

Why not? The guy took the trouble of engraving it. Looks like people are already funding the block ;D

True archivists know that digital technology has no longevity...computers may not be around...so to leave a record behind, has to be analog...use carved stone, tungsten, time weather resistant material.

For additional info, please see Tuhtankumen's burial crypt.

Don't know if this has already been posted here.
Check this out. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/862339253/fahrenheit-2451-preserve-your-data-for-eternity (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/862339253/fahrenheit-2451-preserve-your-data-for-eternity)
Nanoform will last for centuries, they say. Keep your privatekeys safe.... for centuries.  :o

What material they use to make those Black-Boxes inside an Aeroplane, that thing can take a good beating and it seem to survive in heat, water, etc. It'd be pretty safe to put some keys inside a safe box made of the same material.

But the thing is none of these things are safe from physical theft, they may last for life long but if a thief is able to get to them, they will be able to swipe off the key and steal the funds, they don't even need to move the carved stone or whatever and when and if bitcoin gets more mainstream we will see more robberies to steal people's stacked bitcoins.

I actually like this idea alot, I would deff want to lock it down to the ground somehow tho ;D

You never know what will happen; BTC is designed to continue on tx alone.

I did test OP's idea on a decent sized piece of granite I recently found. I did several attempts but no private key could be read afterwards. :(

I like the idea of amber more than anything.  ;D It seems to be more feasible, as it got us 4 Jurassic Park movies  ;D ;D

What if you decide one day to check your private printed keys/carved in stone and they got stolen? You are implying those would always be safe, but physical thefts exist and sometimes we forget about this in this internet world.. I don't really get how storing your wealth inside a box at home is safer than several digital copies + copies in the cloud (specially when Maidsafe is release it will be pretty much impossible to lose your digital copy of a wallet).

BIP38 encryption? IMO, they are pretty secure from bruteforcing if you choose a hard password. Of course, this wouldn't be viable if you do lose your password but you can still store the password somewhere safe, far away from your paper wallet. Alternatively, multi sigs can potentially prevent this problem by either placing them at a few secure locations or with a few of your trusted friends. If you need to spend it, you would at least need m of n of the signatures. This would protect against theft and it would provide redundancy.

Isn't BIP38 an encrypted QR code? I like it. I think ALL paper wallets should be encrypted. I feel totally unsafe by leaving around a private printed key.. i think it's insane. But if it requests a password after scanning, now that's safe. Im pretty good at remembering important passwords. What would be considered a strong pass in terms of amounts of characters?

Problem with tungsten blocks is you'd have to trust someone to engrave your private key unless you've got some pretty hefty drilling equipment.

Ideally it would be something hard wearing that you could drill yourself with just normal power tools.

You could use a M-Disc: http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc, lasting up to 1000 years.

A QR code on Nickel or Gold, as we know, that metals have a slow corrosion, that give them a long live and nickel is really hard,it will support extreme conditions.

You can get your private key tattooed on your ass by a dumb tattooist who knows nothing about BTC. Make the font a pretty large size so the ink doesn't fade or go warped.
Of course I'm being silly here but to be fair nobody would ever see that private key for long enough to be able to copy it or photograph it ;D
In all seriousness I wouldn't carve a private key into a stone, you could get it engraved on a steel dog tag or something like that.

Lazer stone engravers might become hot sellers in Athens

starts wondering how long it might take to solve a block carving hashes into stone

This is just not a engraved private key into a block of tungsten, it is a practically a pierce of art. Perhaps that is the problem: Did I have one, I'd like to show it off... Perhaps make one with the public key for show off and hide the private?

I can only imagine if a super noob came across this thread and thought, what the heck are these folks talking about. To them I say, just get a blockchain.info or coinbase wallet and enable two factor encryption (which is simple) so you can store your coins w/ plenty of ordinary safety. Guys, we need to be more friendly and welcoming towards the general public rather than messing around w/ technical hoopla and highlighting absurdly novelty storage products.

I consider it to be quite safe. I have found a reddit post (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wqdfo/if_bip0038_uses_scrypt_to_ensure_bruteforcing_is/) which discusses about the security of BIP38. Even if someone does invent a scrypt ASIC to bruteforce your wallets, if you have a long character, lets say 11 characters. If the password doesn't contain dictionary words and is alphanumeric, it would be considered as relatively secure the longer the better of course. Afterall, to be able to crack it, they need to get the string of BIP38 encrypted private key which can be quite of a challenge.
It would be extremely unwise to point them to a online wallet if they are looking into Bitcoins. Numerous vulnerabilities have occurred with blockchain.info even though they allow the users to have control over their private key. Coinbase don't even allow the user to control the private key unless you opt for coinbase vault. Even so, they may have the potential of knowing your private key. You can easily point them to a SPV client which offers pretty much the same features with much more assurance.

Yep. Fuck bc.i wallets and the massive amounts of non-trivial BTC loss from them.

Digital copies can be destroyed by huge Solar flares {Electromagnetic damage} A big enoug Solar EMP can wipe out most electronic devices. There are also rumors of a super-EMP nuclear weapon, that could do this too.

Some people have reported E2 damage during a lightning strike and also from geomagnetic storms.

The safest bet, would be to carve it out onto a physical substance... Stone.

A friend of mine, says he hates his kids. He is divorced and his wife and kids are sucking him dry. He wants to engrave his Bitcoin address onto his tombstone and throw away the private key. He says, this is the only way for him to keep his treasures away from his wife and kids.

I am working on him to rather donate it to charity.  :(

i am not sure but i have heard about carving bitcoin address and private key on a piece of wood that is resistant and you can keep it for years.
but i think all of this things don't attract much customer and are just for bitcoin enthusiasts :)

but to add to the discussion the best material for this purpose is aluminium, because of the weight, cost and corrosion resistance that it offers and also the shiny surface that can be hardened to prevent any scratches. you can use stainless steel too but it would get heavier but it can be worked out at the same cost.


edit: i think this is the image of the wallet that i have seen a long time ago: http://www.offlinewallets.com/images/bitcoin-wood-wallet.jpg

It's a solution alright, you encrypt the key, engrave the key on the stone, it will last forever and you don't have to worry about someone stealing the funds because without the password it can't be used. But I don't think I can trust myself to remember a strong password which is big enough, has no dictionary words, contains alphanumeric, small & capital letters and special characters, I would need to write it down somewhere. So the question again comes down to where to store the password?? Carve it on a stone? :D

I think for now I am just going to use the traditional approach, put the key on different encrypted USBs and print 'em on paper and put them all in a safe place and try to protect it from Damage/Theft myself.

BTW, how much does the machine that carve things on stone like Tungsten costs? I'd imagine it won't be any cheap.


This sounds nice (although it doesn't provide protection from damage like fire etc.) no other type of hardware needed, just put them on the dvd burner and burn your key on them and if what they say is right, it'll last a 1000 years and the pack of 3 is cheap. I might give this a shot.

Again, why would you want to carve it into a stone. Realistically speaking, that isn't cheap and if you wanna buy a specialized engraving device, it is only one use. It may last long but so do paper wallets and even hardware wallets. If you are afraid of forgetting your password, you're better off making several backups of a paper wallet or just use m of n multi sig wallets as I said. In case of fire, I doubt a carved stone would survive with all the letters clearly visible anyway. Technically, if you keep it safe, no one can steal it.

I think it's more down to the novelty value of having a solid private key object than something that's really durable. A huge metal block is impractical to say the least, I'd prefer a laminted paper wallet over that any day though it wouldn't have the cool factor of being ingraved into something.

this is heavy i just do of line wallet pen usb and keeps me good for my 5 dollars in btc lol (kidding i do the on line exchange site wallets its ferect for small trades