But why go through all the trouble of building a robot if you can spend 20 minutes punching the seed by hand? Don't get me wrong, it is cool and I wanted something similar for paper backups but concluded it's not auditable.

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Thanks, I appreciate your honesty and viewing angle. Hammering a machine readable output-descriptor by hand is going to be more than challenging though. For Seed alone your right IMO

If you want to backup descriptors then yes but is it even a good strategy? Why not just store the descriptors as a digital (possibly encrypted) backup on 20 servers or so? It has one big advantage that if you upgrade your wallet scheme (e.g. to SegWit version 2 presumably with CISA) you can trivially update the descriptors and you don't have to touch backups.

But if you insist on backing up descriptors this way maybe a more viable solution is to hammer just the descriptors using the machine (they don't contain anything critically private) and hammer the seed manually afterwards. This makes the machine securely reusable. That being said you might be able to just get someone to engrave it for you on CNC/laser cutter/... and ship it to you without much hassle.

optionality is king…

There is no single solution suitable for everybody for sure 👍