Totenpass Inc., a company that empowers users with the ability to permanently store their precious digital information, is pleased to announce the launch of its website and hardware solution in beta.
Totenpass is based in Rochester, New York, at the former Kodak research and development facility, which revolutionized film photography. For over four years, the company has been developing a permanent digital storage drive constructed from solid gold that requires no energy and has no movable parts. Digital data is written onto the drive by way of a proprietary light-diffraction process that imprints images, documents, and other files that can be stored as either human-readable, without the aid of computers, or machine-readable, with the employ of a smartphone.
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Totenpass empowers you to store your precious and personal information: family photos, important documents, intellectual property, or any other digital file. 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 erased or stolen. We invite you to make your personal history into a tangible and everlasting treasure.
How it Works
Visit totenpass.com and click Create Drive.
Select drive size:
Medium ($50 USD) - contains 0.2 grams of pure gold and can store up to 2,196 pages of visual or textual data.
Large ($75 USD) - contains 0.4 grams of pure gold and can store up to 3,894 pages of visual or textual data.
Upload your digital files with ease using our online drive builder tool.
Confirm drive contents and complete payment using a credit card or cryptocurrency. Receive your Totenpass within three business days.
A Storage Drive Made of Gold and Nickel
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. By having your data permanently embodied in these special elements, your precious information is safe from annual decay, natural disasters, and online risks. It is also good for a sustainable future, as Cloud services depend upon an obscene amount of electricity while the Totenpass is built once and requires no subsequent energy consumption.
The Name
The name "Totenpass" is a German term that translates to "passport of the dead." It used to describe ancient metal tablets, usually found in the form of thin gold sheets, and often found in burial sites, which cultures across time and place used to store important personal or religious information. Because this information was inscribed upon gold, it has endured for millennia and has thereby allowed modern historians to gain a deep insight into the beliefs, history, and culture of the past. Not only was gold physically the only medium which would preserve this cultural knowledge, but it was also a symbol to the ancients of eternity and everlasting life.
Every Totenpass is Unique
The Totenpass is like a canvas, and you are the painter. You may choose to store only one file to be displayed and enjoyed with pride of place in your home. Think of your most memorable family photograph, a love letter, or a valuable NFT. 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. We give you the freedom to build the drives as you please, for whatever purpose. Whether you're a mother, a creative, or a financial or legal professional, you will find the Totenpass to be the one true way that your hard work and cherished memories can be with you for the rest of your life and beyond.
We Never See Your Data
We have created a one-way digital-to-analog conversion process which means that nobody at our facility can see your data, and the information that you upload is never stored anywhere besides on your Totenpass. Our technology has been trusted by leading corporations such as Arch Mission Foundation and even the US Military. For passwords, private keys, or other sensitive symbolic information that you may wish to store, we have developed an open-source total encryption standard which you can read about here.
Totenpass Reader App
On your smartphone, open the Totenpass reader app in order to transform your smartphone into a microscopic scanning device which allows you to re-convert your physical data into a digital file. This technology has taken nearly half a decade to develop in collaboration with several European universities. Beta users of Totenpass will not yet have access to the reader app, which is expected to launch in 2022.
Total Encryption Standard
Your Totenpass can be totally encrypted and protected by a passphrase. Using a combination of modern and peer-reviewed key-derivation and encryption algorithms (Argon2id and XChaCha20-Poly1305), you can input any plain text such as a password list, a mnemonic seed or a private key, or up to 2 KB of binary data and have it safely stored onto your Totenpass.
Totenpass Referral Program
The company is launching a generous referral program that is built on bitcoin. Referrers are given a unique referral link that provides their friends and family with reduced shipping while earning the referrer $20 in bitcoin for each purchase made with the referral link. To learn more about the Totenpass referral program, visit: https://www.totenpass.com/referral.
Statement from Roy Sebag
The computational paradigm, driven by our increased dependency on the Internet, has led our modern society towards an unprecedented level of centralization, control, and lack of privacy. Families have gone from storing their precious family photos in physical photo albums to uploading their memories onto Facebook. Students have foresworn the typewriter or paper and pen in favor of writing their unique theories using Google Drive. Although this paradigm has proved to be increasingly practical and convenient, we have sacrificed something of our autonomy and control over our precious information. We implicitly trust that these third parties will be here forever, that their systems will never fail, that in 50 years, we will be able to show our children their baby photos by pulling up our iCloud account. This implicit trust is taken for granted, and yet many of us still hesitate to believe that this is the best way of storing our information. When Facebook is down for a whole day, where do all those photos go? When a document is uploaded to Google Drive, is there a risk that it could be hacked and stolen? When Cloud servers need more and more energy to support a growing amount of information, what will become of our small bits which could be gone if anything as little as an electricity shortage or as great as a natural disaster occurs? Will we even have enough energy or wish to use this much energy to support these systems in 10 or 20 years?
With Totenpass, we offer a permanent solution. Totenpass presents an unprecedented means of harnessing the intrinsic physical properties of gold in order to preserve such information once and forever. It is an ancient technology made new. You can now exit the Internet paradigm by storing your most precious information offline on indestructible gold, which you can hold in your hand, rather than on decaying hard drives or on third-party servers. You can be confident knowing that this data resides nowhere else: it is your personal property which your progeny can enjoy for generations to come. Libraries, companies, museums universities and historic institutions may also choose to preserve some of their most precious data using this permanent archival method.
We are launching Totenpass in Beta, providing the ability to store images and documents at first as well as works of art, cryptocurrency and NFTs. In the future, we will also provide the ability to store audio and video files directly on gold. The reason we have waited this long to launch was to ensure that we could provide the means to read back the data on your drive through a hardware-software solution that we have developed. At this stage, the reading technology is not available in Beta, but we expect to make this available in the near future. What the Totenpass can do right now is physically store your most important files while providing you with the knowledge that those files can be recovered in the future. I believe that this is the right approach towards building this business, based on extensive consumer research. It seems that most people, at this stage, feel a sense of urgency to simply be able to store their information in a form of backup that is in personal custody, and that is exactly what we have achieved.
Totenpass is designed to spread via word of mouth. If you appreciate what we are building and are aligned with our mission please share this information with your friends and family and make sure to join our generous referral program.
Statement from Bruce Ha
I believe that Totenpass technology will be a giant leap forward for the permanent archival of mankind. Information and knowledge will be stored and preserved in pristine condition in gold for tens of thousands of years, currently the longest archival medium known to man. Family heritage and cultural legacy will no longer be lost to arcane digital storage systems or paper, CDs and other hardware devices that can disintegrate and be permanently lost in time.
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