Deleted

[Amitabh S]

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.

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?

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

[Hollingsworth]

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.

[AgentofCoin]

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
Nanoform will last for centuries, they say. Keep your privatekeys safe.... for centuries. 

[bitbaby]

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.

[Acidyo]

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.

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

[mmmaybe]

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.

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.

[Anony]

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

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

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.

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).

[ranochigo]

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.

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.

[manselr]

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.

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?

[newflesh]

snip

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

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.

[batesresearch]

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

[seoincorporation]

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.

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.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

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
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.

[Bitcoinpro]

Lazer stone engravers might become hot sellers in Athens

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

[mmmaybe]

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.

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

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?

[Chef Ramsay]

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.

[ranochigo]

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.

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?

I consider it to be quite safe. I have found a reddit post 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.

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.

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.

[TheButterZone]

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

[Kprawn]

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.

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).

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.