Tangible blockchain

Ten years ago

What I want is a 100% guarantee of immutability. A hash and proof of work don't give me that.

Shah Maheri paused, she knew Yolanda could be prone to flashes of violent impatience. 100% is not possible, quietly, watching her face the whole time. Better immutability, pretty good immutability, but think of change as an unstoppable force. Hurricanes, wild fire, rising sea level, if we could we would "fix" them, but they are a force unleashed by decisions made generations ago.

We could 3D print, lab create, crystalline blocks with the information stored inside. The showed is was possible over a decade ago with diamonds and nitrogen vacancy. Diamonds are a girl's best friend, what's not to like, but there are other crystals with more interesting properties.

Like what, asked Yolanda? Tourmalines, right off the top of my head, I haven't researched it. The electromagnetic properties of minerals fall into three classes, conduction, pyroelectricity, piezoelectricity.

I get conduction, where do the other two fit in?

Pyroelectric minerals, like tourmaline, axinite and dravite could have a bit of steganography. You could build the jewel so that it's contents can only be read after the entire structure of the gem is stable at a certain temperature. Piezoelectric would be very easy to engineer so that if you struck it you could access it for a period, but I suspect we can do more imaginative things than that, shy grin.

I'm in. Yolanda funded the lab in stealth startup mode. Being the frugal gal she was, the design was to make money from the get go. The first product was the Blockiamond, 1 carat diamonds with 1TB data storage, 3D printed, evenly spaced nitrogen vacancies, or voids, 1 if an electron is present, 0 if not. A solid state stick can hold a lot more data, but Blockiamonds are a lot more immutable, care to rewrite a GIA registered diamond? Thought not, and ladies look good in square-cut or pear-shaped 1 carat ice blocks strung as a tennis bracelet Talk to me Harry Winston.