Topic: Coinplate - a new, ultra durable Seed Phrase Backup solution (Read 616 times)

I oversimplified a bit when talking about a screw fit. We didn't make the holes larger or made the screws looser actually. The main difference is that sockets now are better aligned with threaded holes, so screws are easier to put in. In the past we had a bit of difficulty during manufacturing where sockets and threads (they are on different plates) were not that perfectly aligned as well as their angle was sometimes not perfect. I am talking about some minor things, that come from the fact that machining stainless steel is pretty hard, even using proper machines and tools. We just improved the process a bit.
So the previous situation was that it was sometimes a little bit hard to screw the bolts in (even at room temp). Now it is much smoother like it should be. However, the dimensional tolerances of the screws and threads are still the same and according to proper norms. The screws and threads offer the same durability, it even might be better now as it's easier for the user to completely tighten the bolts.  Hope I cleared things up.

Despite having a minor issue with the deformation of its screws, I'm quite impressed with the results, but I think the original design would've been slightly better ^{[not sure if I missed something or not but in theory, slightly looser fit screws provide a bit more room and that could lead to a higher degree of deformation]}.

Yeah I agree, important thing was protected and every product can always be improved, so I am glad that you fixed small issue with screw already.

I think next step you should make for Coinplate is to work more on marketing, and maybe making some partnership with other products like hardware wallets.

Indeed, the unit he received was from the older batch, the screws used to fit pretty tight.
In the meantime, we made some improvements to the manufacturing process so the screws now have a slightly looser fit and are even better aligned for easier opening and closing. This should mitigate some of the problems.

However, I would like to emphasize that the most important job of the backup and screws is to protect the seed inside the unit, so it made a pretty good job, even if a bit hard to remove. After a house fire or collapse, I would be most interested in backup survival, even if I would need a hammer or power tools to open it.

Cheers!

Congrats on receiving great rating after Jameson Lopp testing!
Coinplate is not the cheapest option available but it is still one of the top choices from all the stuff he tested.
One thing I noticed and I said before there could be a problem with usage of screws that became slightly deformed after heat testing.
This could be improved in future, but important thing that template and data remained intact.

Hi there, it took some time but just a few days ago, Jameson Lopp posted the last round of stress tests and all our products were included.

We received a top, Triple A score for all our products. Just like expected.
The stress tests included:

• heating to  2000°F / 1093°C with a propane blow torch and rapid cooling in water
• submerging in a bucket of 16% muriatic acid and left for 12 hours
• using 20 ton hydraulic press to deform it

methodology

You can check the test results for Coinplate Alpha here.
It held strong, no data loss of any kind. You can check our blog post with commentary as well.

https://getcoinplate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/CA-stress-test-comp_c-.png


Regarding the Coinplate Grid type, it depends on the user, some prefer the markings to be less obvious, hence the design. I myself prefer straight and simple solutions like in Coinplate Alpha.

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Hi there,
I've checked the article you mentioned and it seems that this applies mostly to regular, carbon steel that is zinc coated. My understanding of this "white rust" is that it eats up a zinc coating. Since Stainless Steel we use is "naked" and has no coating, because it is naturally rust-free, this will be no concern.

You can check the previous post where I linked up to a third-party stress test. It was submerged in 16% muriatic/hydrochloric acid and the product survived it well. Our own tests also show that it holds very well against corrosion. Getting into details, AISI304 steel can get some surface level,  minor rusting in sea salt environments after years of use but even there it will not make your seed unreadable. Everything is engraved quite deep and punch marks are also deep enough.

Furthermore, the design holds your seed inside a tight stainless steel sandwich which limits contact with any corrosive agent whatsoever. In the test I mentioned earlier, the acid was applied on an open device and even in that scenario, it survived well.

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Like on every market, there are multiple manufacturers because each of them has different ideas on how to achieve the given functionality. Some are focusing on low price, others on high volume production and some are offering sturdy, high-quality products like us.

What I wanted to achieve is to provide simple to use, ultra durable solution to the problem of storing your seed phrase for long time. We aim at durability that will hold your seed safe for 10,20, 30 or more years. If you would like to bury it in the ground, go for it, it will surivve. Would you like to put it inside a wall and forget? not a problem. Our backups are made from super thick plates and engravings are very deep. Also the design protects your seed inside the thick steel sandwich so it is protected from getting scratched or else.
 
In my opinion most of the devices on the market focus on being just durable enough while being cheap and easy to manufacture. It is not our case, we first thought about making it as durable as possible, not skimping on metal.
Our products weigh a lot, the stainless steel used is actually most of the cost. Other solutions use much less metal and are probably much cheaper to manufacture but 1 or 2 mm plates are not the same in terms of durability as our 2x5mm plates. Also, deep engraving takes a lot of machining time on proper high-power laser machines. You can check the last round of Jameson Lopp tests to see that other manufacturers often cheap out on this and just etch the markings on the surface so it is destroyed easily.

We went overboard with Coinplate design and made it excessively durable. Coinplate weighs over 2.5 lbs or 1 kg and is made with heavy-duty Stainless Steel. Both plates are 5mm or 3/16″ thick (gauge 6) and are joined together with stainless steel bolts to form a steel slab 10mm or 3/8” thick. This is much thicker than our competitors and we make it that way so you can sleep safe. Coinplates should survive getting run over by a truck as well as being shot with handguns. There is no reason to do that but that means it will survive massive drops or being crushed by a house rubble in case of disaster.


[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

I do appreciate the effort and that there are many different companies to buy seed phrase backup option, but still I always wonder why so many companies do the exact same thing. There are so many seed backup plates already that are like yours only a piece of steel with some fields on it. Maybe you could tell why your backup solution is better than others on the market?

Sorry, I don't remember asking you anything about this topic
I was not talking about some ''fancy things'', but about independent durability and stress testing of metal.
You would know that if you actually read what was written before, and if you actually checked what happened with many metal seed backups before.
Maybe we don't need to test anything that exist in world, like cars, smartphones, etc... they are also just metal and plastic parts.


https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/

What kind of review you expect when we talk about a piece of metal? 
All that are just a fancy things, you buy just because you like it (and/or want it), not because you really need it.
Steel plate, washers, Morse code - you may live without it. It is as needed as silicon case and protective hardened glass for you hardware wallet. If you like it - just do buy it and enjoy. If you think spending $100 for piece of metal is too much - do not.
 

Gests are welcome too  

You can just purshase any of "strong metal" plates and write your seed in the Morse code using two different sizes of drills! (piercing it)

Writing the word "Metal" for example would looks like this:

I just wanted to know if the Stainless Steel used for this ....also get what we call "white rust" in our country? Here is a article explaining this :
https://www.metalsupermarkets.com/what-is-white-rust/  ....because the small dent might "fade" if other corrosion takes place on the surface of the plates.

I live in a area where there are a real problem with rust... and I cannot use any product that will be influenced by rust and corrosion for something that holds very sensitive data. 

I wouldn't call this a real encryption, but I guess it could work better for some people, while I prefer regular words myself.
Are there any news and updates regarding Jameson Lopp detail testing of your Coinplate, like we talked about several months ago?
Prices from 74€ to 257€ are a bit to much for my taste for something that was never independently tested and reviewed.

Product update:
We changed the layout of our Coinplate Grid product to use a bit of encryption that some of our customers asked for.

You can check it out here on the product page: https://getcoinplate.com/product/coinplate-grid/

Basically, you punch the numbers of your seed phrase on BIP39 list instead of the words themselves.
Let's say that your word is "Plate", you check up the BIP39 Word list and see that Plate is number 1330. You use a center punch to mark 1330 on a grid. This way it is a bit less obvious when found. This is something that quite a few of our customers have asked and we gladly delivered!

The tiles-style backups are not as durable as I would like. They tend to be quite popular but I can't really recommend any. In our solution, the bolts are quite big and strong, and even if they broke, your data is still fine, just like you said. The thick plates where your seed is marked are not going anywhere, these are monolithic.


That's exactly what we recommend in our instruction manuals, unless you make more than 3 mistakes on each letter you should be fine. Still, we include a marker pen so you can test mark your seed first, double or triple check and after that make some dents in the metal.

We did reach out to Jameson recently and we shipped him retail samples. He is about to make a batch of seed phrase storage tools testing in the coming weeks. He will probably include our products. Can't wait to see the results, but we are quite confident in the results as we did similar tests by ourselves before. We have also started working toward getting some reviews and tests from other sources, as well as providing some quality videos from tests we do ourselves.

Some people might say that swinging a hammer near your fingers is anything but easy. There might be a smaller risk of error with Coinplate actually. I believe that Coinplate Alpha is the easiest solution out there, we even include a marker pen so you can first test mark the seed phrase before making any dents in metal. And if you made a mistake, you can just make a correction by making two dots on a correct one, just as we say in an instruction manual. Still, if you prefer you can get a Coinplate Punch and stamp your seed phrase with stamps and a hammer inside our 10mm stainless steel sandwich.
I'm a big fan of DIY stuff myself, but you can't do everything yourself obviously. Also, it's not for everyone and quite often there are better, ready-made, options available.

Most other designs which include bolts or screws are designs which utilize the "tiles in a holder" type design, which I agree perform very poorly as even a small amount of warping or movement and all the tiles fall out. This design doesn't feature the same drawbacks, and if the screw or bolts loosen up a little here then no data is lost.

I don't think so. If you mark the wrong letter it would be pretty trivial to hammer in a few more marks to obscure that letter to signal you made a mistake and instead mark the correct one. You would have to make a large number of mistakes for it to be completely unusable and require an entirely new device.

Have you sent your Coinplate to Jameson Lopp for testing?
All stainless steel plates with bolts I saw in his testing tended up performing poorly compared to regular single plate without bolts.
Thick metal is good but I don't really need any special machines or tools to join stainless steel washers together and make it even thicker and smaller than Coinplate.
I am not saying anything against Coinplate and I think the price you set is fair, but I prefer DIY solutions that are even cheaper.



Here you can find ratings for most metal backup solutions for bitcoin, and clicking on them will show you full tests:
https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/

So are you saying making seed words backup with Coinplate is effortless?
I don't see anything hard in stamping your own letters to washers, and learning process can even be fun, even if I destroy few washer along the way.
On the other hand, if I make mistake with Coinplate I will have to throw it away, order new one and wait for shipping.
Some would also say that your system with letters and numbers is more complicated than regular one word on one washer.

No problem.
I like to have multiple options, and people can choose what they like most.
Back to Coinplate, until I see some independent testing and reviews (maybe by Jameson Lopp or similar) I will refrain from further commenting here.

Thanks for the replies and sorry for the delay. I must've missed my e-mail notifications... I'll reply to you all below.

As we are obliged by local and European Union's law, we have to delete all private data after request. As far as I know, a similar law is in place in California. Nevertheless we chose to extend this right to erasure to all customers, to make them safer.

We erase all your data from our database after the request. As already mentioned here, we allow 30 days return period, so we have to keep your data for this long to fulfill this right to return. We are obliged to allow all returns by another EU's law, so this is a necessity. We just extend all these rights to all customers to make our and customers' life easier.


Indeed we forgot to add this info in the Privacy Policy as it seemed obvious, thanks for the notice, we already updated the document.

Also, we are working on updating our privacy policy and implementing even better mechanics of cleaning our database to protect the privacy of our customers.

Thanks for the kind words, we strive to make good, solid products. This is a good idea for a video, we are working on one already. We will probably add some stress tests videos in the future too.


The main benefit of Coinplate seed backup is that it is made from very thick stainless steel plates and connected by some proper, stainless bolts. You will have a hard time creating something as durable as Coinplate yourself without some proper machines and tools. I imagine you will spend quite a few hours attempting to make something similar, even if you are a DIY enthusiast and have the special, necessary tools. Stainless steel is quite frankly a pain in the ass to work with. We made all this hard work for you so you can save at least a few hours of work and probably quite a lot of $ in tools. All this while achieving price around 40% lower than some of our competitors. I believe it is quite a good deal for this type of product.

Obviously, anyone is free to make some DIY backups. The washer stack idea is for sure one of the best diy options. I know it's doable, as I've done some in the past myself. However, I didn't quite like the process of stamping your seed phrase with a hammer and letter stamps. It is not effortless at all, and I'm quite handy with tools. I imagine there is a quite big group of people who don't like using a hammer or any workshop tools basically. Some folks don't have access to a workshop and would have to make all this work on their office desk or kitchen counter. Like with any ready-to-use product on the market - might be a bit more expensive than DIY but it will make your life easier, that's how it works. Still for folks who would like to stamp their seed or use an electric engraver, we made a separate product.

Please don't take me wrong, I believe there is place for both ready-made solutions and DIY projects. Simply not everyone will want to spend their time making something from scratch and risking some mishap.

I understand your general concerns about data safety on the Internet, we are working to make it even more secure for our customers in the future. I believe you can make some steps to increase the safety of your data by a lot. For example if you used cryptocurrency payment and used some different address (i.e. work), maybe with slightly changed name, along with some spare e-mail account you will be pretty safe, even if someone has all this data.

Thank you all for solid remarks and discussion!

It is much easier for me go to local store, buy steel washers and add my own letters on them without leaving any trace of buying anything related with Bitcoin.
For your plate I would have to leave some digital trace for purchase, and I would have to live my personal details, name, delivery address, etc, than I would have to wait for package to arrive.
After package arrives I would still have to go with similar procedure of entering my backup on plates.
I see clear advantage for my DIY steel washer compared to your plate, and I would have to pay much less or create X times more backups for fraction of the cost.

I noticed that many members posting in this topics are spammers, or hired group paid to bump this topic... so please stop doing this, or this will be reported.
This includes members: ADAM Alams, BTTlobverss, Butern Butler, PSULLWALERS, Abusadaoxes, Albam Jorden.

This is a very good product and will be a big hit in the community everyone needs good storage or a backup solution for their seed phrase, I recommend that you can create a video for this besides the explanation you have on your page, people want to see videos of products on how to use the product, it can attract more customers.