No offense, but while you may have a valid claim about the refund process, complaining about whether they have their prices set in USD or BTC is kind diluting whatever claims you make. Why does it matter in the slightest whether they have their asking price pinned to USD or BTC? Was there an issue where you paid in BTC and your refund wasn't the same amount in BTC? If I decide to sell a coin and pin it to crude oil, but accept X barrels worth converted to BTC, who cares? Now, if there was an issue where you paid BTC and got refunded a different amount, fair enough.

(I did get my coin I ordered, and I also asked ahead of time before ordering because the thread said that quantities were limited and they updated quantities on saturday)

Ooof, I cut the metal melting time short by too much because I was tired and wanted to turn it off. Bad call. Anyway, will have the updated example likely friday then, possibly tomorrow.

Righto, all prepped and ready to start tomorrow morning, so there should be some result come tomorrow night.

Expecting  the supplies I need to arrive tomorrow. They take ~16 hours to make, so a presentable prototype could be completed by wednesday night.

I considered using a QR code, but they'd be much too small to machine even with a laser cutter. Some of the features would be under 1 micro meter. As far as tarnishing goes, inevitably they will tarnish like any other piece of metal. When that happens, cleaning your piece will restore it back to new condition. Tarnish may even make the keys more legible whether you want that or not. There is a product called liver of sulfur that people brush on silver to make it tarnish. The common application for that is people that want to put a rainbow patina on silver coins and charge more for them, or for lettering. If you apply the oxidizer to the text and surface, but only clean the surface, you're left with high contrast black lettering. Thats likely what was used for the QR code sample you pictured. Thanks for your suggestion, I'm really liking the split pair idea.


*Edit* Woohoo, only a minor delay this time. You can't hope for none, so I always just hope for quick and fixable. I went through the process of preparing the wax copy for casting, and I noticed my vacuum chamber was acting a little odd, but continued.






The wax copy came out alright but not fantastic. My vacuum pump isn't pulling a deep enough vacuum and left some air bubbles in the silicone. No big deal, just need to order a replacement part.

Yep, shouldn't be a problem. I'll be able to work with you on specifics in a day or two once I've finished my material and concept testing, but I'll shoot you a pm to get the ball rolling and see what you have in mind. I believe I'll be able to do it without any problem, but I'm doing a test run tomorrow just to be safe. I like to run into problems while no one is counting on me not to run into problems. I've made rings before, but manually by pouring metal ingots, rolling it through a mill and making barstock that is cut, fused, and hammered into a ring. I'm trying a different method this time, but as I said I don't expect to run into any problems.

I got the mold made for the test, I should be able to have it done tomorrow night.

So here is the test model I'm about to print and then I'll cast it in a few different metals for testing. Its a size 8 (18.14mm ID) 4mm tall, and 1.75mm thick (the one I printed previously was 5mm tall and 2mm thick and it just felt too big for my liking)





Once I'm certain of what will and what wont work, I don't need to say that anyone needs stealth or anyone needs a certain design. As long as what you want fits and doesn't have any weird geometry issues that'll mess with the fluid dynamics of pouring hot metal, we should be golden. I should be able to put most hand drawn sketches on there, or change the shape/design entirely. Once I've finished the tests, I'll start modeling something a bit more interesting design wise.

Heres some other junk I've made recently (20kt gold) unfortunately it looks like I don't have final result pictures for either of them, that was the pre-polish stage for both so there are still some little scratches visible at magnification  

I don't know exactly yet. I'm going to make my own, record the costs, and go from there. The process I'm using is about the same as what a regular jeweler does, so expect going to a jewelry store and buying a wedding band prices, not Bitcoin collectible prices  

Making them in .999 silver isn't a problem, but if you plan on wearing it daily, I'd recommend not using .999 silver or 24kt gold as they're soft metals, but I can do it. I've made some vastly superior alloys with much better visuals and strength.

I will make a couple copies out of 24 kt gold and .999 silver to test how much battering they can take without losing a letter of the engraving. There are hardening techniques that help, but I'm not certain to what degree. I'll also throw them in a wood fire for a while to make sure there isn't any deformation before I go ahead and market these as fire resistant.


Righto, so the one I have pictured as you can see is resin and not cleaned up properly. It was sort of a letter size/depth test before I make one for myself. Next step is to make a test one for myself out of a few different metals. Like I mentioned to Buck, I'd like to have a better idea of what level of wear and tear these can handle in different metals before I go saying these are vastly superior and more convenient than well done paper wallets. I'll post the test results as well as pictures along the way.


That wouldn't be a problem. The number of characters you can place on the inside/outside sort of depends on the size of the ring, but I can also change around the text font and size to make it fit. You can put whatever you'd like on the inside or outside.

My first thought was to just put a private key on the inside of a wedding band style ring. I'm absolutely not advocating anything illicit, but I've had trouble in the past bringing Bitcoin project related hardware even on domestic flights. Hardware wallets look like obscure electronics, they aren't looking at you like a financial criminal, they're wondering what that tiny little encrypted circuit board is really hiding. A wedding band wouldn't garner the same suspicion. On that note is where I mention the design. The test model I ran is just a sort of boring band. I could deck it out with some neat designs and features, Crypto related or not, but that also may be writing "TARGET HERE!" on it. There will be a ton of options available to people. The size, material, whether you have the public key on it at all, split keys, multisig keys, I'd recommend encrypted so you aren't actually handing me your keypairs. If you really want, I could just put cryptic gibberish on it to trick people into thinking you have a Bitcoin private key  


Theres a .975 silver alloy that uses palladium/platinum and germanium that I highly recommend. Germanium mixed into silver creates a clear oxide layer on the surface, sort of like how aluminum oxidizes. That serves as a barrier that helps to prevent the silver from tarnishing the way you're used to when silver. Its about 6x stronger than sterling as well.

Ahoy! I'm in the process of making something I wanted to do for a few years, namely, discrete wearable key pairs. A long time ago, Charlie Shrem had a ring with one of his private keys engraved into it, and I thought that was pretty neat, sort of like an emergency access to some coins just anywhere on the go. I got caught up with the technical details, and dropped it to move onto something else. Anyway, the other day I learned about a new feature in the 3D modeling software that I use that would allow me to get past one of the issues I had with the idea. The other problem I got hung up on was obscuring the keys. I experimented with using a lesser purity alloy to fill in the engraved letters. When exposed to high heat, the metal would melt out, exposing the keys. While its possible, its not really feasible for a number of reasons. Anyway, after trying out this new modeling feature, I decided that fancy security features on the physical side may not actually be needed. A private key could be encrypted before being engraved, it could be a riddle that leads you to the GPS coordinates of where you buried your paper wallets, unintelligible gibberish, or anything else that could be imagined could be put on it. Shrem's ring had his keypair minus one character engraved on the inside for example. I'm confident that a suitable security measure exists to mitigate risk.

Would anyone be interested in something like this? As pictured,  I can currently make them in silver, any karat or color of gold, and pretty soon Platinum. The images below were just a preliminary test to make sure the lettering was sufficient, and that I could put something other than text on it. Its just a standard boring ring, I'll make some more interesting design wise, but for mine I'm personally undecided whether boring and unassuming would be more secure than flashy.

Locked topics don't move. If they're locked, no one can post in them (including the owner) but they are still available to read. Either a moderator or thread creator can lock a topic. Threads can also be deleted by moderators, where they are moved to the trashcan.

Righto, I'll shoot you a PM on saturday or sunday and  take a couple if you've got them. If I end up melting them, I'll try to turn them into other Bitcoin collectibles. Decreasing the number in circulation helps out the people that purchased them previously 

I keep going to pull the trigger on one or two if available, but it'd be an awful shame to melt these down. I'm not sure how many you have left, but if you reach the point where the community has had ample chance to own them for the sake of owning them, and you just need them gone, say the word.

The problem with the "All lives matter" thing isn't the sentiment you get just from the name. By the name, you'd think the all lives matter movement is an amendment in fighting against injustice against all people rather than black people, but its not, its a protest against a protest. Black lives matter doesn't mean that all lives don't matter, if you ask if their tenants specifically state that police brutality is ok if its against other races, they aren't saying it is. They just needed a name that was direct to their point. Sort of like how mothers against drunk driving will allow you to partake if you're a father, or don't have any kids at all.

Straight to the point, all lives matter is absolutely true, but that isn't what the all lives matter movement means.

It depends on the surface area of the person orthogonal to the wind. I can give you an idea without getting into gross math, but I'll explain the assumptions made and where gross math would change things and why. If you have a background in vector calculus, we can run this again in a more realistic scenario.

The average adult male has a surface area of around 2m^2. We'll say that you're only facing the wind with either your front or back, and ignore the surface area from the top of your head/sides/etc. 50Kg would be a very thin "average man" but lets roll with it. Wind speed is our unknown. One assumption that we'll make is that the wind is completely orthogonal to you, so there is no vertical component. The person is standing straight up and the wind is coming and hitting them head on at a 90 degree angle like in a wind tunnel. If that isn't the case, we just need to find the horizontal and vertical components of the force of the wind separately with some easy trig functions, but we'll quickly end up in more complicated territory if we follow that.

How much it would take to push you backwards is based on a lot of things, center of gravity, what you're standing on, what type of shoes you're wearing, but we can make an approximation again to avoid gross math. If you have a mass of 50Kg, then your weight is your mass times the acceleration due to gravity, 50Kg * 9.80m/s^2. We'll round that to 500N. For the wind to push you, it must overcome the static friction of your feet on the ground and your weight. Google says the coefficient of friction of pavement is about 0.7, and we are going to once against ignore the interface between the pavement and whatever type of shoes you're wearing. The force required to move you would be f = (coefficient of friction)*(Normal Force) where normal force is your weight. so 0.7 * 500N = 350N of force is the threshold for moving you if you stood still.

To get the force of the wind, you need the density of the medium (air) , the surface area its acting on (the person), and velocity of the wind. The density of air is 1.23kg/m^3 and we estimated the front surface area of a person to be about 1m^2. With that we can solve for the velocity squared. (sanity check, Force (Newtons) has units Kgm/s^2. If we multiply (kg/m^3) * (m^2) * ( m/s)^2 we get kgm/s^2)

So to push you back, we needed 350N. F = 1.23kg/m^3 * 1m^2 * (X)^2. X ends up being ~16.9m/s or about 37.8 miles per hour.

To actually lift that person up, you'd need the force of the wind to be greater than their weight of 500N. As mentioned about horizontal/vertical components of the force, A wind coming straight at you will never launch you up and into the air no matter how strong it is. In reality wind is a vector field and its not going to hit you with uniform velocity or direction. The best approximation for understanding the concept would be again the wind tunnel scenario above, but this time its more like one of those indoor diving simulators where you get a suit and the wind blowing up from the ground keeps you in the air. That would occur when the force of the wind is >500N or at  20.2 m/s or 45 miles per hour.

That isn't to say that a 45 mile per hour wind is going to pick you up if you are walking down the street, but its the minimum possible wind speed to lift a 50kg average man. If you turn to your side against the wind, it'll take significantly faster wind speeds to push or lift you. If you are walking forward against the wind and not just standing still, it'll impede your walking but not push you back. If you have rubber soles on your shoes, that'll change the coefficient of friction. Lots of other considerations, but I'll hold off on doing those unless you specifically want to know.


Theres a zone known as tornado alley in the southern United States where they're a pretty common occurrence. Elsewhere they're relatively rare. I don't know the exact amount of damage and fatalities tornadoes cause across the states, but they aren't a usual weather pattern. I'm reading over this now as I post it https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-tornadoes-and-thunderstorms

What does this have to do with macroeconomics?


I can very easily find you proof that your concerns about macroeconomics were within projections by first finding published records from the BEA and US Commerce Department. Showing published information that your concerns are inside of the models they use, and then linking the current economic advisors using those models based on press conference statements and accessible proven records. What I cannot do, is interview a government spokesperson and ask them how many ousted spies there have been so far, or how many they expect are still remaining and what impact they have. If I spend an hour compiling all of the proof in the world and then you respond with, thats what the spies want you to think! I've wasted my time.

What you've substantiated is that there is a negative economic effect because of Covid. Duh... Your sources aren't saying, "The lockdowns are causing this" they've said "the lockdowns and covid are causing this". Cool, 900,000 jobs lost, what about the 10 billion people that have already died and lost their jobs (I'm counting the subterranean people that have been hit even harder)?

https://www.history.com/news/8-mysterious-underground-cities
https://www.popsci.com/humans-survive-underground/

Nice ad hominem, we get right to the meat and bones of the problem, and rather than addressing it, you avoid the entire thing. Can you give me just a little hint on how anyone could possibly go about proving that there aren't spies intentionally infiltrating and sabotaging our public policy?  If I do manage to find definitive proof, will you pink promise that you won't just deny it as a hoax from the Russians that are pretending to be Chinese infiltrators to shift the blame onto the Chinese?

First your point was that the government was not competent of complex economic analysis, so I set out to find evidence to the contrary. I asked you to elaborate on where you stopped believing in common sense so I could find specific proof and not waste my time explaining that 2+2 = 4, and then you come back with ghosts and bigfoot. Can you prove that ghosts exist? No, but you can't prove that they don't exist either. That must mean that ghosts exist and you can make the statement that ghosts exist and anyone who says otherwise is wrong and a hater because they can't prove that they don't exist.

I don't think that we should base our public policy on ghosts.

Yeah, none of that is clear at all. So even if I did prove that Trump approved the best possible choice given the information available at the time of his choice, and that he took into consideration the advice of however many aides and economic/medical experts that I could find evidence of. The models that the experts were basing their advice on were comprehensive and inclusive of your concerns. You'd still be able to nullify all of it with actual baseless claims that someone sabotaged it. What was the point of asking for proof?  

Common sense isn't a baseless assumption, the very definition is the base assumption. If something works the way common sense dictates in 99/100 cases, it becomes common sense and you tend to believe so unless something out of the ordinary dictates otherwise, not the other way around. I don't really care that your world view is "non traditional", just don't bother wasting anyone's time asking them to disprove that the ghost of Lincoln is running the shadow government from the basement of the pentagon.

Not that I have a cat in this fight, but at least a few of those examples don't seem to fit the bill for paraphrasing. Its a little iffy but somewhat reasonable if an uncommon phrase sticks in your head, but it'd appear to me that the likelihood of of it being a simple memorable phrase decrease when your sentence structure is the same and there are sort of uncommon bits of stylization where you'd expect it to say or

example 4 is full of the signs of plagiarism that sort of sticks out in people's coursework. Stuff like putting the ö in Schrödinger’s is fairly uncommon unless you are copy and pasting, as not many people know how to type a ö. Consistencies in stylistic/ideological capitalization, like Spirit, and other little things like (the Holy Spirit). Though at least you didn't plagiarize the colon

I wouldn't call any of that conclusive evidence for failing someone, but you look for other patterns from there.

Fair enough, to me it is common sense, but I suppose to you the info in your sources might be common sense.

Anyway, tell me where you start to disagree and I'll start from there. Trump has an interest in the economy, the White House has economic advisors, Trump has consulted with his White House economic advisors, Trump has consulted with his medical advisors, They didn't just make up random stuff to tell the president, they both have the capability (human resources, equipment, ability) to make predictions,  Policy was created based on their input.