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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

The bad news is that Diamond was able to correlate to status, a strong (if subjective) value that is part of humanity since always. BTC only appeal is its value as money ...

Startup idea: Bitcoin wedding rings.

A beautiful gold ring with a private key engraved on the inside. Give your loved one the gift of BTC! Your commitment to each other, eternalized on the global blockchain.

Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but the modern woman prefers Bitcoin to carats of squeezed carbon. Status, store of value, it's all there.

(This is satire, but now I'm worried it will actually happen if the coinmania doesn't subside soon.)

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Where I come from your nickname would soon be "4-fingers"

Same risk with a $10k diamond ring, right? Yet people buy those from Tiffany's.

Doesn't a diamond ring lose value once it is sold, though, in terms of re-sell value? A ring worth one bitcoin is not going to lose value once it is sold (aside from market volatility).

Yeah, but it's business as usual for petty thieves to cause 10x (or 100x, or 1000x) damage for a 1x payoff.

1000× times the diminutive likelihood that this nicely immutable paper wallet hasn't already been spent.

(A paper wallet is a paper wallet even if it is written on gold in tengwar runes that only appear when subjected to fire)

Yes, a diamond ring cannot be resold, since the price of diamonds has been decoupled from the difficulty of getting them. You're not paying that jeweler for the diamond on the ring; you're paying him a special fee for being a De Beers recognized diamond merchant. A bitcoin doesn't have that problem.

However, a ring inscribed with a private key controlling one bitcoin will lose its value immediately, because whoever comes into possession of (or ever sees) the ring will move the bitcoin.

Shrem wears a ring engraved with the code that gives him access to the Bitcoin "wallet" on his computer.

"They started calling me four-finger Charlie“

http://www.businessinsider.com/charlie-shrem-arrested-bitcoi...

Is that also true for diamond ring wearers?

Just watched a movie on Netflix yesterday called Bitcoin Heist.

A B-grade fictional movie focused around "Ghost" who has the QR code to his wallet on his ring. Worth a watch if you're sick in bed.

Fun anecdote: the movie is depicted when $BTC is $250 and they're chasing after 30k and 40k bitcoin.

I think that jewelry should have a property of showing off, so hidden private key wouldn't work that well. You need to have some mechanism how to show status. And that nicety factor was driven mostly by women decorum.

Simple, have an embedded device in the ring with a tiny display that gets and displays the real time value of the wallet.

That's just a question of recognizable design and enough marketing spend, i.e. branding.

It's well known that people pay a major premium for things solely because they have words printed on them like "Calvin Klein", "Guess?" or "YSL". Jewelry branding is actually easier to make visually recognizable than clothes.

People don't pay a premium for the label, they pay a premium for the middlemen who host the label, because that is a presumably exclusive group and culture that they have access to.

Well you can easily sign stuff with your key and people can easily verify how much coin is in the account.

I predict at some point we’ll see a rap music video where they “make it rain” QR codes of high value Bitcoin addresses.

You could make it able to sign transactions from the account with something like a Java ring: https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076641/learn-java/an-intr...

Though for a wedding ring you'd clearly need a different look.

The problem is how do you get the private key engraved without sharing it with the jeweler or whoever?

I had this idea a few weeks ago. I think it would sell, but how do you tie the ring to the bitcoin effectively?

Engrave the key on the inside of the ring.

The key is information. One glance at it, by the wrong person, and it becomes worthless.

Then you can't get your ring professionally cleaned.

Generalization: Bitcoin jewelry.

And bitcoinjewelry.com seems to be taken -- somebody's already on the case. I'm not looking forward to it.

Love the idea...;-)

For Christmas, I'm giving books and I'll write a paper wallet seed in a page with some BTC in it already.

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