May 20, 2015 | By Alec

Getting married is expensive, and we’re not even talking about the wedding itself. Rings quickly cost thousands, especially if your fiancé dreams of a diamond. And then you can better start praying that it isn’t a blood diamond or that the ring falls into the sewer the next day. But what if there was another way of expressing that love in money without easily losing it and without exploiting African miners?

And that is, in a nutshell, the concept behind the 3D printable BTC ring, developed by Seb Neumayer and his Bitcoin-crazed friends over at thebtcring.com. They have developed a 3D printable ring that can be made of any material, but that features a QR code linking to a Bitcoin Blockchain. Instead of spending the money on a blood diamond, you pour the funds into the Blockchain, which can be easily checked for value instead of trusting some jeweler.

As the team behind the BTC ring write on their website, this enables prospective brides to really see how much they are loved (if that’s something that can only be expressed in a dollar figure). ‘Lookup the value of your BTC ring using our android app ,’ they write. ‘Diamonds are shiny, but then your friends don't know how much was spent on you. With a BTC ring, the bling is in the code.’ However, the advantages of not losing the ring, the possibitity of adding more to the value at a later date and deciding together what to do with it are also mentioned as advantages, as becomes apparent from the promo clip below (which features excellent acting).

But perhaps the best thing about the BTC ring is the option to include inscriptions in the blockchain, enabling you to almost engrave the ring with a written testimony of your love. ‘Personalized "blockchain inscriptions" not only make the ring more sentimental, but also prevent “relationship double spends” (e.g. Bob can’t give a loaded up ring with a blockchain inscription “Bob Loves Alice” to a girl named Cindy),’ they explain. ‘To inscribe messages at your special address, simply send some Bitcoin from your special address to the address that is the BASE58 encoding of your message (plus the header and checksum).’

What’s more, the 3D printable nature of these BTC rings means you are in complete control of design. To design on, download the OpenSCAD file here, and be sure to add the Bitcoin address you would like on the ring. ‘Then simply "compile and render" and then export an .stl file for 3D printing your special components.’ Optionally, this means you can even give your partner a metal ring using Shapeways 3D printing services!

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

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Jesus Fucking Christ wrote at 5/21/2015 1:28:37 AM:what the fuck is this dumb fucking shit are you kidding me in what reality do you liveAnon wrote at 5/20/2015 9:22:02 PM:le gentlesirs can woo all m'ladies with such a fine piece of jeweleryKWHudson wrote at 5/20/2015 4:01:45 PM:Could someone scan, then use your bitcoin?



