Richard’s Minerals
Where it was found, who dug it, who cut it, who owned it. That history usually lives in someone’s memory, in an old email, or on a label that gets separated from the stone. When it goes, what’s left is whatever the current seller says.
This is an attempt at somewhere for that history to live that stays attached to the object.
It isn’t a printed code or a QR link. The chip does real cryptography and produces a brand-new signature on every tap, counting the taps as it goes. Photograph the tag, copy the address, forward it to a friend: none of that reproduces a genuine tap. The server can tell the difference between someone holding the stone and someone holding a screenshot.
A dealer’s description, an owner’s own observation, and a lab measurement are three different kinds of statement, and the record keeps them apart. It never flattens them into one confident voice the way a sales listing does. If a locality came from the person who sold it, the record says so, with their name on it.
Entries are added. A later entry can correct an earlier one, and both stay visible, so a correction looks like a correction instead of the record having always said the new thing. Each entry is cryptographically linked to the one before it, so an entry altered after the fact shows up as a break rather than passing silently.
It cannot prove a stone came from where someone says it did. No system can do that from the stone alone. What it can do is make the chain of who said what, and when, permanent and readable, so a buyer can weigh it themselves instead of taking one sentence on faith.
It cannot prove the tag is on the right stone. A genuine tag moved to a different specimen would still read as genuine. The defence is a photograph of the tag mounted on the specimen taken the day it was issued, kept in the record, so a later viewer can compare it with what they are holding.
An unbroken record is not the same as a proven one. It means nothing has been tampered with in a way the system can detect. That is worth something, and it is not the same as proof, and this project will not describe it as proof.
Early
The system is built and running. The first specimen has a record: a watermelon tourmaline slice, bought in May 2025, with the seller’s locality description recorded as the seller’s description, and a photograph taken on the summit of Mount Washington nine days later. The page that displays all of that to a visitor is being built now.
If you sold, cut, collected or dug a specimen and can add something real to its history, that is exactly what this is for, and you will be credited by name for what you contribute.