Deleted

[TookDk]

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

[bri912678]

Consider engraving your private key into a block of tungsten



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.

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.

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/

[TookDk]

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. 

[abercrombie]

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.

[shogdite]

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/

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:

[gentlemand]

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.

[Kprawn]

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. 

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. 

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

[TookDk]

--snip
I think a 100 years from now, Bitcoin would be a distant memory
--snip

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

[CrackedLogic]

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.

[TookDk]

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.

[CrackedLogic]

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.

Gold is too risky, it will always have a high theft risk and your future generations may just see a coin slab and not check the key, also gold scratches, bends, and dents easily, this could mark up one of the letters or numbers and no eligible key. If the pyramids were made of gold they wouldn't be standing today.

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.

[TookDk]

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.

Gold is too risky, it will always have a high theft risk and your future generations may just see a coin slab and not check the key, also gold scratches, bends, and dents easily, this could mark up one of the letters or numbers and no eligible key. If the pyramids were made of gold they wouldn't be standing today.

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.
 

[CrackedLogic]

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.

Gold is too risky, it will always have a high theft risk and your future generations may just see a coin slab and not check the key, also gold scratches, bends, and dents easily, this could mark up one of the letters or numbers and no eligible key. If the pyramids were made of gold they wouldn't be standing today.

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.

[oblivi]

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.

[CrackedLogic]

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.

[pereira4]

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.

[ToshiOcean]

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.

[TookDk]

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.

[HarmonLi]

I was thinking about long term wallets and how the steel wallets are neat and paper wallets are fine but what about a long term wallet to last for hundreds of years, this lead me to think of ruins and then it went to carved stone. Stone carvings and markings have are able to last an extremely long time as we have seen but has anyone thought about carving their private key into a stone and building it into your house or keeping it in a safe? No need to worry about fire and wearing down wouldn't be a significant issue unless it has a constant erosion variable. This may sound crazy but it just seems like the best long term storage that has proven the test of time through history.

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!

[TookDk]

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.