Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdevsrex | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder if simply burying what you have is a better option. One of my long standing goals is to buy some raw land for hunting and camping, like 50+ acres.

I could easily bury several caches of valuables, that only my immediate family knows about, and let nature regrow over it.

I mean, what are the chances that a rando stranger is going to be in the middle of nowhere with a metal detector?

View on HN

“There’s money in the banana stand.”

Don’t take your cell phone with you when you do the burying. And only tell your family about it with hand written notes. And make sure they know not to look up any information related to the caches. And that they know to never speak of the caches near an internet enabled device.

Also, don’t disturb the ground in any visible way. Just comparing google maps satellite imagery is enough to uncover your hiding place. Probably better to disturb many places and only hide valuables in a few of them.

Better take some sort of GPS device, though. Otherwise you may never find it again. Who was the British chap that buried a bunch of silver before WWI and never found it?

Sure but you can never reconnect that device with the internet directly or indirectly.

Alan Turing? I think I remember reading about that in the Hodges bio.

Edit: Yep, Turing - https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savin...

And at that point, I ask what are you burying that is so uniquely valuable that you don't need to access? I guess there are circumstances around cash or coinage that you don't want the government to know about--though that's increasingly hard to spend in large quantities today.

And to what degree to you trust your family with this secret information?

So at my last job, I did engineering/land development for cannabis farmers. Everyone I knew had a story about burying money and forgetting where it was buried and being unable to find it.

Also, lots of cash was recovered destroyed.

Now... One thing I will say about that is, it's harder to find a good spot than you'd think, and good spots are more predictable than you'd think. I've notice several such cash stashes. I worked with a guy that had an even better eye for it.

> it's harder to find a good spot than you'd think, and good spots are more predictable than you'd think

Now you've got me curious, can you elaborate?

I assume that if you bury a box of any size, you disturb the ground quite a bit. You also probably don't bury it in a random open field but near some landmark you can easily locate.

Yeah pretty much exactly this.

There are signs and landmarks. Trees, stumps, rocks, corners, etc.

Sometimes people make a mark to make it more recoverable, like a notch in a tree, or a topped tree.

Especially when a big part of my job is figuring out what the terrain and vegetation looked like before disturbance for restoration work. I can see 30-100+ years of history on a forested property just by looking around or occasionally reading old surveyors descriptions and stuff.

Beyond that, after you've seen a few, you start to get an eye for the type of spot people like to choose. People are very bad random behavior generators.

Yeah, but many people have buried their money and later found it deteriorated beyond use. Make sure to use some good containers if you go that route :)

Gold. Nobody buries paper money.

> Common causes of damage are fire, water damage, chemicals, explosives, damage caused by animals (including consumption of the currency) or damage from extended burying of the currency [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutilated_currency

Surprised mold isn't on that list. I make sure to add silica gel packets even to my indoor safe these days due to the poor ventilation.

I think mold or fungus could be one of the biggest causes of issue within the "buried money" category

Tell that to Walter White…

"Narcos" might not be fully factual - but I think Colombian drug cartels were burying cash.

When you have their volumes of cash its impossible to launder it.

They don't burry their cash because it makes sense to do so. They do it because it would be impossible to buy that much gold. Or much of anything, really. I wouldn't be surprised if, after expenses, the Treasury is the largest beneficiary of the drug trade through seignorage

if I recall correctly there was a part where they showed some of the cash was ruined.

Actually a lot of people have tried burrying paper money, I guess what you meant is "nobody smart buries paper money".

One of the best choices is PVC plumbing pipe (schedule 40). It's designed to be buried, and with glued end caps, it's also (obviously by design) waterproof. It has to be cut open, and it obviously wouldn't be good for storing huge amounts of stuff.

I would think the more likely threat would be that someone sees you making a deposit.

Haha right! Or that some ne’er-do-well tricks or coerces you into revealing your treasure’s location.

I know someone with considerable net worth who converted a good chunk of it into buried treasure, some of which I understand he has literally buried in places, and some he has squirrelled away under the floorboards or similar.

He put a fair bit of thought into:

A) Not forgetting where it is B) it being highly unlikely anyone would ever stumble across it and C) Ensuring his heirs find out about it should anything ever happen to him.

C) was the tricky part, as he’s a lawyer, and therefore doesn’t trust lawyers, and he’s of a generation where technical solutions don’t appeal, and is ultimately the point of risk for anyone trying this route - either you accept that it crosses the Styx with you, or you tell someone, and take the risk therein.

His view on C is that if his kids aren’t smart enough to find it, as he’s apparently left plenty of clues, then that’s their problem, not his. Part of his reason for being obtuse is that apparently in the jurisdictions he has concealed his wealth, buried treasure is taxed far more lightly than inheritance, and he wants them to have reasonable ignorance and deniability.

> C) ... should anything ever happen to him

I'm pretty confident he will eventually die, one way or another.

> apparently in the jurisdictions he has concealed his wealth, buried treasure is taxed far more lightly than inheritance

Ah, so basically it's a case of wanting to evade the laws of the society he lives in.

And he's a lawyer? Unsurprising, but shameful nevertheless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com