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Totenpass is a permanent digital storage drive made of solid gold
- yellow_lead 5y agoWhen their whitepaper is written in Microsoft Word and has citations to news articles, be wary!
- simlevesque 5y agoCheapest ? No. Most effective ? No. Most persistent ? No. They compare with disks but don't compare it with other materials such as marble.
- debdut 5y agoMarble reacts with almost anything, gold and nickel is the last thing to react. Elementary school chemistry: Gold is the least reactive metal
- human 5y agoThis. And I always laugh when people say gold has no value. It’s literally the best metal known to mankind. The reason why it’s not used much is because of its price.
- Smoosh 5y ago> It’s literally the best metal For some particular values of "best". As gold is rather malleable (soft), these plates would probably scratch easily.
- bjowen 5y agoThere’s a lesson here in what “value” means. But - try to handle some fine gold one day. It is lustrous, but also incredibly easy to dent - drop it and it’ll scratch like a 2010s-era phone. It is easy to work, but won’t hold its shape. If we had oceans of the stuff, we still wouldn’t use it to make a car or a laptop or a pistol or a building, it would take the place of lead in things like counterweights and radiation shielding, maybe home insulation or cooking foil, places where its softness and density aren't too much of a drawback but the low reactivity is beneficial.
- human 5y agoYes, of course, it’s not for all cases. One interesting thing though with gold is that it can be melted and reworked basically forever. This means that if you own gold today, your great-great-great-grandchildren could still be using it in 1000 years. This is not true of most materials. Gold’s value is basically the present value of all future uses.
- shakna 5y ago> Elementary school chemistry: Gold is the least reactive metal Yet another case of elementry school chemistry over-simplifying and getting things wrong. Silver and platinum compete with gold, even if you stay within the realm of elementary school definitions of metal.
- patrec 5y agoLet me guess, you don't own any silverware?
- shakna 5y agoI have both goldware and silverware. But that's pretty much irrelevant, as they're alloys. Platinum is the least reactive of the things people recognise as metals.
- patrec 5y agoYou're right that silverware will tarnish much more quickly because of the addition of copper (and possibly other metals) -- so a bad example from me. But whilst pure silver is much more resilient to tarnishing, it will still slowly tarnish because even normal indoor air is prone to contain trace amounts of gasses with sulfur like hydrogen sulfide, which will react with the silver. Whereas I don't think pure gold does. My guess would also be that most people who had school chemistry would order the silver, gold and platinum correctly in terms of their relative reactivity (and value) because this replicates exactly the order of fanciness of credit cards, record sales etc.
- dn3500 5y agoMarble is too soft. Granite is better. I've made arrangements for my most important personal data (full name, birth and death dates) to be engraved on a granite slab when I die. This slab will be physically arranged alongside others, one for each family member, showing the relationships among people. This will be set up in a special location set aside for that purpose, outdoors safe from fire and building collapse. I expect the data to still be readable hundreds of years from now.
- pstuart 5y agoUntil the property gets developed a couple decades later and they "move it".
- krasin 5y agoEgyptian pharaohs knew a solution to that problem.
- b3lvedere 5y agoIt seems the larger the size of your grave, the better it gets preserved. :) I wonder if Jezz Bezos will have build something that's even bigger than a pyramid or the Taj Mahal. Maybe he'll buy half the moon or something.
- myth_drannon 5y agoBring a bouldozer, load everything on a dump track and dump it in a nearby forest.
- valyagolev 5y agoare those things your most important personal data? if i cared this much i’d probably prefer to leave a sentence or two rather than my proper name…
- jaza 5y agoI can imagine that, in the near future, there will be headstones in cemeteries, with nothing on them except a QR code, which will require an app to scan, and a key to decrypt the data. I wonder what future civilisations - where smartphones and encryption algorithms have been long lost - will make of that? And we thought the Egyptians left us a tough one to crack!
- Victerius 5y ago> Our revolutionary storage drive helps you to retain control of your data while reducing your dependence on third parties and the Internet, where these files can be easily copied or stolen Odd of them to think that an object made of gold won't be stolen at some point in the far future and melted down into whatever shape its new owner deems fit. The cheapest and safest long term data storage is stone tablets. Terrible information density and a logistical nightmare to move around though.
- sp332 5y agoIt's only about $25 worth of gold in today's prices. It's not a huge target.
- debdut 5y agoIt’s not about efficiency, think how many years a hard drive will last? 3 years. How many years a gold plate will last? thousands of years. Least reactive metal not for a reason lol Plus if there is a ion blast from a nearby supernova, it’ll erase all electronic storage devices on earth https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8 https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8
- ravel-bar-foo 5y agoIf there is an ion blast sufficient to wipe all electronic storage devices on earth, won't the associated radiation also be fatal to a large percentage of the population?
- throwawaytemp27 5y agoNo. People are more resilient than electronic storage media.
- valyagolev 5y agoeven if not, if all the electronics suddenly stopped a sizeable chunk of the population will die immediately or in a bit… i wonder how many safety protocols for objects with huge blast radius are dependent on electronics running continuously
- david_van_loon 5y agoThis is an interesting idea, and it's neat to see companies thinking about long-term data storage. The density in this case seems rather low, which might limit the usefulness for most applications.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 5y agoWhy gold? Seems awfully soft for something meant to last forever.
- debdut 5y agoelementary school chem: gold is the least reactive metal and most of the things made by humans that we found about the ancient world are made of gold
- teruakohatu 5y ago> most of the things made by humans that we found about the ancient world are made of gold That is a bold statement. Meusums are filled with non-gold artifacts!
- smegger001 5y agoyeah this seems to be ignore the massive amount or pottery and ceramics we have.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> and most of the things made by humans that we found about the ancient world are made of gold Pretty sure stone wins by volume.
- sabujp 5y agogold pressed crypto
- atdrummond 5y agoAsk how well this worked out for Scientology, who set out to do this with L. Ron Hubbard's works. Their efforts were essentially for naught as they used a now deprecated type of LaserDisc. (https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-scientologys-secret-bunkers https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-scientologys-secret-bun... https://tonyortega.org/2013/08/31/the-history-of-scientologys-weird-vaults-the-bizarre-battlefield-earth-connection/ https://tonyortega.org/2013/08/31/the-history-of-scientology...)
- raasdnil 5y agoFrom what I can see here looks like they've also archived Hubbard's works using text and simple recording methods powered by solar and mechanical; https://www.scientology.tv/series/inside-scientology/archival-project.html https://www.scientology.tv/series/inside-scientology/archiva...
- adolph 5y agoA well formed religion might be thought of as an effective form of long term data storage. In that case Hubbard was on the right track even if his creation wasn't.
- wrycoder 5y agoJust ask for another download.
- adolph 5y agoAside from religions, that was essentially my other thought: send data via lasers aligned to stars such that the light was bent back to earth for download. Of course then you have the Betamax problem...
- robin_reala 5y agoThe entropy is pretty bad though, both in data and the interpretation of the data through medium translation. Another example of long term data storage is oral folklore traditions. Some Australian Aboriginal myths, for example, are claimed to contain references to geological events that date back 40k years.
- creatonez 5y agoThis service only supports images, pdfs, and small QR codes?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slyrus 5y agoHell, if it's good enough for Chad...
- paxys 5y agoWhy is this ad voted to the front page?
- confutio 5y agoThis is a joke right?
- diego 5y agoI cannot believe nobody has mentioned 5D optical data storage. Much denser, designed to last 10 centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
- ckdarby 5y agoSounds cool but not used in any practical manner and I couldn't find anything about write and or read speeds.
- pmlnr 5y agoAnd? Think of it as alternative to print.
- peteradio 5y agoI don't know man, I'm partial to oral tradition.
- saalweachter 5y agoThe trick is to structure all of your emails in rhyming meter; it helps your descendants recognize and correct errors in transmission.
- tomcam 5y agoUsername checks out
- HPsquared 5y agoDoes the optical drive also last 10 centuries?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Isamu 5y ago> transform your smartphone into a microscopic scanning device which allows you to re-convert your physical data into a digital file. So the reader is just an app. A normal smart phone is supposed to have the resolution necessary to read this. And the app isn’t available yet. Hmmm.
- tempodox 5y agoWill Apple or Google be around in 10,000 years to let you download the reader app?
- vermilingua 5y agoAdditionally nowhere in the “whitepaper” does it explain how this smartphone-powered retrieval works. Presumably by attaching a lens to the camera, but then the claim of “with only a smartphone app” is false. Additionally assuming civilisation falls, the ability to shape a lens that can discern nm details will probably be lost also.
- stonegray 5y agoBeing able to store an order of magnitude more data than a typical smartphone's output image size does not bode well for the reading process being simple or practical.
- imglorp 5y agoWhat's the resolution limit of optical macro zoom these days?
- webmobdev 5y ago> A Totenpass can be human readable, without the aid of computers, or machine readable, with the employ of a smartphone. I am guessing data that is supposed to be read from an app will be encoded in some manner - like QR codes (for example).
- teeray 5y ago> Or you may choose to store thousands of documents or photographs to be retrieved at a later date using our proprietary reading technology… That will work great once the company fails and its IP is sold off to some faceless entity. Truly long-term storage would include a specification for building a device to read the data.
- jedberg 5y agoBack in the mid-90s, consumer CD burning was pretty new. At the time blank CDs were about $1 each, but it wasn't uncommon for the disk to become unreadable in less than a year because of degradation. There was however another option -- gold plated CDs. These were $10 each, but supposedly lasted at least 10 years without going bad. My entire dorm floor shared the cost of one box, and we'd use it for our most precious files -- our MP3 collection. I still wonder where that disk is and if it still works...
- 1_player 5y agoI don't know if it is intended or not, but the punchline makes it funnier. Indestructible disks are useless if/when they get lost.
- tomcam 5y agoMark has it, and no.
- gambiting 5y agoI recently helped with a data recovery effort at our company, where he found(stashed in a warehouse) CDs with the source code to some of our earliest games. Dates on the CDs were around 1994-1998 era. And you know what? Those gold discs are all useless, completely unreadable. You know what still works? Those verbatim blue AZO discs, all of them read just fine 20+ years later. Of course treat it just as an anecdote, who knows what condition those discs were stored in over the last 20+ years, but yeah, all the gold ones we found were dead.
- pmlnr 5y agoThis is not the first of it's kind: see https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
- password4321 5y agoWhile we're here (archival storage), anyone already using M-DISC? I feel like the best bet in the short term is to buy a new, ever-larger external hard drive every year and copy everything onto it, keeping the old one off-site. -- Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978099 (yesterday)
- Double_a_92 5y agoYeah M-DISC is probably the best way to store important data (i.e. for me mostly old photos). Hard drives still seem a bit scary to me, even if you have multiple copies. I.e. you accidentally drop it and all the data on it might be gone, or there is some technical problem with your PC and also gone... While on an optical disc once you burn it it's always there (unless maybe you use brute force to ruin it).
- abrookewood 5y agoI'd never heard of M-DISC before. [0] "Verbatim M DISC™ optical media is the new standard for digital archival storage. Unlike traditional optical media, which utilize dyes that can break down over time, data stored on an M DISC is engraved on a patented inorganic write layer – it will not fade or deteriorate. This unique engraving process renders these archival grade discs practically impervious to environmental exposure, including light, temperature and humidity." [0] https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/ https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/
- password4321 5y ago3rd party review w/ photos after leaving it outside for 6+ months: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www... (spoiler: it survived). I think they are readable in all drives, but only burnable by certain drives. Also, they are not manufactured in DVD anymore, just Blu-Ray. Still hoping for any anecdata from personal use; checking here: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mdisc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mdisc&sort=byDate&type=comment
- fomine3 5y agoTungsten FTW!
- TruthWillHurt 5y agoPlatinum. more expensive, and we all know expensive means it's good.
- dusted 5y agoGold? That soft, malleable metal? Forever? Sure, gold is somewhat resistant to chemical corrotion from just being left alone in a normal environment.. But how does it stand up to scratching, beating, bending and a forest fire ?
- meepmorp 5y agoScrolling down a bit brings one to a paragraph beginning, "The Totenpass is built from solid gold and nickel," which makes it sound like it might be an alloy.
- dusted 5y agoyes, but it's never going to be a particularly strong one, this smells like they're mainly pushing gold because people tend to think of it as the pinnacle, magic material. Sure, it has very nice properties, but I fail to see long-term data storage as one of them.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoNot up on my metallurgy, but I seem to recall that platinum has many of the same electrical and chemical advantages of gold. I think a few of the rare earth metals may also be better. Gold is actually cheaper than a lot of these metals.
- vr46 5y agoSilver-based photographs have lasted over a hundred years (as have actual books) so I think we're probably ok for archival media. There was a process I knew of years ago that replaced the silver in photos with gold or other metals, so that ought to nail it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoFolks in the UK may remember this fiasco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
- gbertasius 5y agoThis is a good way to extract money from people.
- Stevvo 5y agoAt first I thought this was a joke poking fun a cryptobros, but looking further it appears to be serious. I think these guys really do believe this piece of jewelry solves huge societal problems.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoMore likely these guys believe this jewellery is going to solve their financial problems. Given the scratch-ability, the suggestion that these things are practical for robust archiving is laughable. But if they're handled carefully I can imagine them being useful for smuggling data across borders by hand or by mail. Which makes them potentially useful for money laundering, one time pads, and such - at least until customs services catch on to what they are. There are better and less showy ways to do all of the above, but presumably you can print a cover photo or message with some embedded steganography, and the data content won't be visible to casual inspection - an application of sorts, I guess.
- GTP 5y ago111.42 MB of storage is too little to end dependency on the cloud as they claim. Plus this is their "large" format that costs 75$ each. Finding the cost to store my 50+ GB family photo archive is left as an exercise to the reader :D Jokes aside, I think there are better solutions from a home user perspective, I think that on their website they are targeting the wrong user base.
- pr07ecH70r 5y agoWho is going to buy this, I am wandering...? Looks like a physical version of this diamond app that you hold a virtual diamond or something (worth nothing) but it's rare, so it costed like 10k to get it. Besides, there are at least 3 other metals or man-made materials that come to my mind, several times harder and more durable than gold & nickel. Just wandering aloud.
- samat 5y agoThis should be made into NFT!
- nkrisc 5y agoI hope the app is open source, or at least the method for reading it. Apps on the App store are very much ephemeral.
- leodriesch 5y agoYes. Code or documentation on this is crucial to make it really last. edit: Found this on their website under "Every Totenpass is unique": > Or you may choose to store thousands of documents or photographs to be retrieved at a later date using our proprietary reading technology and smartphone app. So open source or well documented is probably not the way to go.
- Double_a_92 5y agoThis is obvious BS... How could your phone possibly have the ability to read data that in encoded in the microscopic structure of gold? It's like trying to read a CD with your phone. No software in the world could help you there.
- marstall 5y agobound paper with words on the pages and a nice leather cover. drop it off a cliff, cut it in half. cut it quarters, hell shred it. rub out a quarter of the letters. get it dirty, magnetize it. forget about it completely (it will turn up when you move). let it sit in almost any dry environment for centuries or millennia. let every technology that existed when it was created be forgotten. It will still be readable.
- indigochill 5y agoIt runs into the same problem as long-term computer media, which is that the knowledge to read it may be lost. There was a period of time when nobody could read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance, even though the hieroglyphs themselves survived.
- throwanem 5y agoStill better odds of legibility than this weird engraved chunk of gold-plated nickel, though.
- HPsquared 5y agoHow much data can be encoded on a single page? Edit: from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_data_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_data_storage I'm assuming black and white is best for long term archiving. "an 8″ × 10″ 600dpi black-and-white image contains 3.43 MiB of data"
- marstall 5y agoI'm picturing words at a readable font size. make the pixels tiny like that and you need some specific technology to retrieve the info - and if the format is fragile, a single smudged bit could ruin everything.
- Double_a_92 5y agoMicroform is similar to what you are thinking of.
- cmroanirgo 5y agoThe Features Page: > The Totenpass is built from solid gold and nickel, which inherently resist destruction, never tarnish and will therefore outlive all other ephemeral forms of data storage, from hard drives to Cloud servers. The FAQ: > What can I do about a scratched card and can I get a replacement? Unfortunately, there is no remedy for scratched surface. During read back, information could still be recovered if the scratches are slight. I'm thinking I'm missing something...
- jhkiehna 5y agoI think they just mean it won't naturally degrade over time, like other physical storage media might. Obviously if you really wanted it bad enough, you could physically destroy the data.
- qayxc 5y agoIf the surface is a gold alloy, you don't really need to want it "bad enough" at all. Gold is a soft metal and unless you treat it with care, scratches will be common.
- Youden 5y agoI think the idea of this thing is that it doesn't degrade over time the way something like paper or a more reactive metal will. It can be scratched but that's easily prevented: put it in a plastic sleeve.
- akomtu 5y agoYou can still make 3 or more copies of data, so only if the plates are damaged in exactly same spots, data wont be recoverable.
- imglorp 5y agoThis would be great if they document how to decode the images. We will have microscopes in 50 or 100 years but there almost certainly will not be any working phones or apps as we know them.
- amelius 5y agoThe problem: its value. People will steal this. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- throwanem 5y agoWorst of both worlds, because the 0.4g of probably low-purity gold coated on to the thing isn't actually worth much. You can't sell it for any meaningful scrap value, but it looks like you could.
- jmrm 5y agoIn 200 years nobody will care about anybody currently alive in the planet, so why somebody would spend money in a permanent storage media. If you do something relevant for the humanity, like Newton, Gauss, or Ampere, you won't need to save any kind of information by yourself. Sharing it with other people will be sufficient.
- Double_a_92 5y agoTo be honest this sounds like bullshit. Either it's optical, but then microfilm would work much much better... Or it's digital but then it's obvious bullshit, because how could you possibly read that data back with your phone???
- tristor 5y agoThe demo video uses a low power torch, focuses on a single point on every other card, but moves around on the Totenpass, and they cut away while it's still cool enough the person recording can momentarily touch it. Gold is a fantastic element in that it's extremely non-reactive, and therefore resistant to most other things. The problem with gold though is that it melts at relatively low temperatures and is pretty soft. Alloying with nickel gives it hardness and raises it's melting point, but it's still well within the range that you could just straight up melt this using a MAP gas blow torch like is used for plumbing or really any significant fire event. Additionally, the other downside of gold is that is scratches very easily. Their FAQ makes it clear that this is still a problem for Totenpass. The only advantage I see to a Totenpass over and M-Disk is that a Totenpass doesn't require any specific hardware to read, but both after being created require archival quality storage and care to prevent damage to the media. You know what else doesn't require specific hardware to read and survives a long time with archival quality storage and care? Acid-free paper. And it's a LOT cheaper than Totenpass. Is this a joke, or do they actually think there's a market for this?
- 300bps 5y agoIs this a joke, or do they actually think there's a market for this? I see ads for emergency rations and even saw an ad for a while marketing a rugged USB memory stick that contains all of Wikipedia on it in case the Internet and society breaks down you can still look up how to do stuff. If people are buying that stuff, they'll buy this I guess. Doesn't mean it's practical but they'll buy it.
- woodrowbarlow 5y ago> a rugged USB memory stick that contains all of Wikipedia on it fyi, in case anyone doesn't already know, wikipedia allows anyone to directly download their database. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
- tonetheman 5y agoThis is dumb but I think I would pay for one of these when I quit playing Animal Crossing. A picture of the save file bits that I could keep forever. This is how I wasted X hours of my life sort of thing. This idea is of course impossible since Nintendo would not give up the save file.
- sysadm1n 5y agoThe copy on this seems anti-cloud, but Backblaze and other providers mitigate bitrot with redundancy and things like RAID. I'm happy enough putting things on the cloud, since it will last longer than my on-prem hard-drives, which need to be spun up every few weeks to keep them working. Not to mention keeping my various SSDs in good shape by using them frequently. I expect my SSDs to last 10 years since I don't do heavy writes to them often. Anyway, I do my ritual of buying a new spinning rust HD every 5 years and copying everything from my old drives for posterity of important data. Spinning platter HDs are my 'magnetic tape' for data storage.
- labawi 5y agoBe careful with the lifetime of data on SSDs (though not the drive itself unless it SW bricks itself), if you don't have it powered and/or you don't give it a chance to read and rewrite data. Especially at elevated temperatures and/or if the drive has been used a lot, maybe also with higher bits per cell. We've had consumer drives lose data after only a few months if it isn't accessed, though that was at 60+℃, so data should last some amount of time in normal conditions.
- webmobdev 5y agoThis is why it is still best to only have your OS and apps on SSD but all your data files on HDD (and backup). When you need fast access for some file, move it temporarily to the SSD.
- mceachen 5y agoCan confirm. SD cards can fall in 5-7 years due to cell voltage drift, and unplugged SSDs can have bitrot that overwhelms onboard ECC in less than a year. HDDs don't fare substantially better, though: bitrot can happen in under a decade due to magnetic entropy/polarization decay. Of course, your mileage may vary, and you may be lucky and get stuff off your 30 year old SCSI drive...
- pyuser583 5y agoAssuming you can still read the thing 10,000 years in the future.
- bunkydoo 5y ago
- gwbas1c 5y agoDoes anyone think this makes for a cool way to print a photo?
- peanut_worm 5y agoI can’t tell if this is a joke or not
- zepto 5y agoWhy not just store it on the blockchain? That is guaranteed to be permanent and immutable according to web3 proponents.
- jaclaz 5y agoPersonally I tend to label anything that has a referral program, and particularly one that promises US$ 20 per referral in bitcoin[0] as a no-go before and besides any consideration on the technology involved (and yes, I know this shows how I am getting old). [0]https://www.totenpass.com/referral/ https://www.totenpass.com/referral/
- lowmagnet 5y agoI immediately read this as "deathpass".
- evolve2k 5y agoStorage of Intermediate Nuclear Waste requires 10,000 years of storage a product like this might be useful for printing all the signage and procedure manuals that you’d want to keep with the waste.
- footlose_3815 5y ago[dead]
- dwheeler 5y agoAnything made of gold is a terrible idea for very long term storage, because if gold remains valuable,future humans will be incentivized to melt it down & use it for something else. After the late Bronze Age collapse the Egyptian government appears to have melted many things. You want long-term "permanent" storage to be in a material that people won't want to repurpose.