PROFILE
Totenpass Ancient Form of Data Storage BY JAKE DRESSLER
T
Roy Sebag, CEO of Goldmoney
otenpass is bringing back an ancient form of data storage that will carry on your legacy for thousands of years. “Data storage is ephemeral,” says Bruce Ha, founder of Totenpass. “With hard drives lasting 3 -5 years and memory cards only lasting 10 years, it’s becoming clearer that we can’t preserve our legacy on Dropbox.” Ha, a Vietnamese immigrant, has been thinking about preserving his family’s legacy since the 1970s when old family photographs were
162 | parkmagazineny.com
tainted by water during his family’s escape to America. “As refugees from Vietnam, my family rushed so much that the only thing my mom took were the baby bottles and the photo albums of our family,” Ha told Park. “During that time, our albums fell into the water and started degrading. I had a lot of trouble restoring them and thought that there must be a better way to preserve data.” Before launching Totenpass, Ha had been engineering technology that could print a resolution of 25,000 dots per inch, and was used to inscribe the entire Wikipedia, 30 million pages, onto a leaflet that weighed
only eight grams. The leaflet was buried on the moon as part of a Lunar Library. Ha’s technology can precisely print thousands of words, pictures and other forms of data onto a page the size of a fingernail. With the idea of permanency in mind, Ha partnered with Roy Sebag, CEO of Goldmoney Inc, to use his technology to help consumers and businesses store their data in more efficient ways. How It Works Totenpass stores your data on a thin plate of nickel and gold the size of a credit card that
