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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

I always assumed the best strategy would be PVC plumbing pipe. You can get 4inch (10cm) diameter sizes cut to any length. Stuff your cash/jewels/drugs + desiccant and use PVC sealant caps with waterproof sealant. Bury as deep as you want. I would expect that to last decades. Plus it should not set off any metal detectors.

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I think metal detectors can only tell the strength of the magnetic pull, which means they can't differentiate between a shallow piece of small metal or a large piece of deep metal.

In other words, salt the surrounding area with lightly buried worthless coins, nuts, bolts or metal scraps and anyone trying to find your loot will give up.

Ground-penetrating radar is a different beast, but also has its limitations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar#Limit...

Nice thing about a PVC pipe is that you can have a screw-cap on the top near the surface, put your stuff at the bottom, and then have a sand or soil "slug" on top that you can easily take out to access what's at the bottom.

You mean like a vertical chimney? Interesting idea to trade convenience of accessibility for secrecy. You could even embed a secondary pipe to make retrieval of the items more straightforward. My concern would be if the tube would stay fully vertical.

No loss of secrecy when it comes to metal detectors.

Why wouldn't the jewellery set off thr metal detectors?

Jewels, as in diamonds are non-metalic. gold is different beast

The loss of value when you as a private citizen sell diamonds is going to hurt a lot compared to gold where you only lose a few percentages to premium spread. With shady diamonds you probably lose 80-90% of the value when you attempt to sell them. If I was hiding wealth it would definitely be gold. Maybe just do multiple sites geographically dispersed so if you lose one it’s not such a big deal

or rubies, or emeralds or any other countless gems that are actually rare (but industrially useless...)

Hopefully diamonds will be like gold in that Twilight Zone episode.

Diamonds were worthless until De Beers paid a marketing agency to make the public think they are valuable.

I was speaking towards the method itself is not vulnerable to metal detectors. If you load it up with metal bars, that’s on you.

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