I've known of the Vernam Cipher since reading about it in Scientific American way back in the early '80s... And I've written several implementations of it in code.

I'm of course interested in what you've done with jpegs, but (based entirely on your very brief description) my comment would be that as I understand one time pads, the only security is in the randomness of the keys. Thus I wouldn't expect a jpeg of any "real image" to be sufficiently random to be trusted.

I think metals are a good store of value, at least up until we can regularly mine the asteroids at a reasonable cost. ;)

I have found (in the past) at least partial copies of the Crypto Maverick's book on http://archive.org... If I come across that again I'll send you a link.

Thanks for your comprehensive reply, my friend! How is your big Tesla project coming along these days?