This. 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.
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.
Yes, 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.
> 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.
I 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.
You'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.
Marble 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.
I 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!
> 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.
It’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
If 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?
even 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
A gold plate lasts until whoever holds it decides to remelt it. Or it gets destroyed in a fire. If you want durability I would recommend sturdy slabs of fired terracotta, preferably stored at a stable lagrange point.
It isn't a gold plate. It advertises itself as solid gold. It is in fact solid nickel, with 200-400 mg of gold peppered in. It's also at most 6.4 x 12.8 cm plate, which is tiny. If it were solid gold at 19.3 g/cm^3, it would have a thickness of 2.6 µm which is thin compared to your approx. 50 µm human hair. It is not, and therefore it is not solid gold.
This 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.
Moore's Law says nothing about "bits stored" or "cost" of storage, and it makes no sense to extrapolate it before the invention of integrated circuits.
Their FAQ still warns about scratches & how you have to use a micro-fiber cloth. I would think there would be some sort of metal you can both engrave very precisely but also not have to worry about it scratching like my eyeglasses.
Or else put a layer of plastic on the surface more permanent than your standard floppy lcd screen throwaway.
You could make it out of tungsten, but it'd be heavy, brittle, and an absolute bastard to machine. It'd probably increase the breakeven cost by an order of magnitude.
For protecting the surface finish of the gold, you'd probably want something like the polycarbonate cases you sometimes see used for rare or precious coins.
A 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.
Aside 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...
The 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.
The geological events are actually backed up with real science. Australian Aborigines are the only human culture whose stories have withstood the test of time - tens of thousands of years, in fact.
The reason is, they used cryptographic techniques (in their kinship system) to validate the stories as they were told among differing tribes and identify alterations.
> A well formed religion might be thought of as an effective form of long term data storage.
An example might be useful; it seems to me that religions inherently distort the message of their founders. For example, most of Buddhist teaching was developed long after the Buddha died. Christians have had multiple doctrinal conferences to determine what is the "true doctrine". Islam has been divided since shortly after the death of the Prophet.
I think a useful example is in the book "How the Irish Saved Civilization." The basic premise is that Christian monasteries isolated from the post-Roman disorder preserved knowledge and knowledge tradition that reemerged later. Stating this is not intended as unqualified praise for the book or to deny the role of Orthodox, Syriac and Islam in knowledge preservation or to say that the deconstruction of the Roman Empire was a bad thing.
This is why engraved stone tablets remain the standard storage medium for religious texts. Easy to read anywhere, especially if you use a burning bush for lighting.
They should come with a cave for storage, else wind will erode the inscriptions. Running water will destroy them too. Even the cave may collapse on it.
Oral tradition could be good too if only the authors would ever bother to add error correction. Unfortunately this revolutionary distributed tech is held back by lazy implementations.
Are they for naught? All they need to do is have a handful of laserdisc players around; your average clever nerdy arduino-loving teenager could probably get one working in the space of a day or two, likely by cleaning optics and maybe doing some re-capping and lubricating this or that.
They are usually are controllable via RS-232 or IEEE-488 and output any of several video formats. All extremely common, well documented protocols. Due to them using analog(!) to store the video, they're remarkably tolerant of defects. As someone who grew up watching a lot of rental laserdiscs with family, it was impressive how much damage a beat up rental disc could have and still play fine.
Man, the memories from that. A laserdisc machine spinning up was the most sci-fi thing EVER to a young kid.
Additionally 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.
Being 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.
> 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.
Back 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...
I 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.
While 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?
Yeah 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).
I'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."
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
M-DISC user here. I cannot attest the longevity claims as mine are around 5 years old but we'll see. Unless you want to crowd fund an lto tape reader with friends and family, you don't have any other option.
Gold? 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 ?
Scrolling 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.
yes, 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.
Not 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.
Silver-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.
I've failed to find a nickel gold alloy with such a small amount of gold ("0.4g" according to the website) that still looks gold/yellow - 'white gold' which is a gold-nickel-palladium alloy has a magnitude more gold in it than that and nonetheless looks silvery.
I suspect this is a coated surface, with the coating being easily vaporized by a 405nm pulsed laser.
More 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.
111.42 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.
Who 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.
153 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadThey compare with disks but don't compare it with other materials such as marble.
For some particular values of "best".
As gold is rather malleable (soft), these plates would probably scratch easily.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
A gold plate lasts until whoever holds it decides to remelt it. Or it gets destroyed in a fire. If you want durability I would recommend sturdy slabs of fired terracotta, preferably stored at a stable lagrange point.
and 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!
Pretty sure stone wins by volume.
We might get 10^14 more bits out of something that costs 10^-7 as much today, but that's only 21 orders of magnitude out of a suggested 1200 or so.
The universe only has 10^50 tons of mass, so it's meaningless to even attempt to describe what would that cost would look like.
I'm personally saving up to buy a bit of storage when it only costs a thousand universes or so.
I do know what Moore's Law literally says. I thought it was fairly obvious I was generalizing, but yes the text as written is incorrect.
If you're not into the thought experiment, that's totally fine.
Platinum I believe beats it. But it is rare to find in antiquity because of the high melting point.
Or else put a layer of plastic on the surface more permanent than your standard floppy lcd screen throwaway.
For protecting the surface finish of the gold, you'd probably want something like the polycarbonate cases you sometimes see used for rare or precious coins.
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.
The reason is, they used cryptographic techniques (in their kinship system) to validate the stories as they were told among differing tribes and identify alterations.
An example might be useful; it seems to me that religions inherently distort the message of their founders. For example, most of Buddhist teaching was developed long after the Buddha died. Christians have had multiple doctrinal conferences to determine what is the "true doctrine". Islam has been divided since shortly after the death of the Prophet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...
They are usually are controllable via RS-232 or IEEE-488 and output any of several video formats. All extremely common, well documented protocols. Due to them using analog(!) to store the video, they're remarkably tolerant of defects. As someone who grew up watching a lot of rental laserdiscs with family, it was impressive how much damage a beat up rental disc could have and still play fine.
Man, the memories from that. A laserdisc machine spinning up was the most sci-fi thing EVER to a young kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
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.
Additionally assuming civilisation falls, the ability to shape a lens that can discern nm details will probably be lost also.
I am guessing data that is supposed to be read from an app will be encoded in some manner - like QR codes (for example).
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.
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...
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 (yesterday)
[0] https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/
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
Gold is actually cheaper than a lot of these metals.
This process?
https://science.howstuffworks.com/alchemy-to-chemistry.htm
TIL
I suspect this is a coated surface, with the coating being easily vaporized by a 405nm pulsed laser.
I think these guys really do believe this piece of jewelry solves huge societal 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.