Topic: Introducing Bitbills! - page 10. (Read 32659 times)

Very cool project ... can go in many tangents .. more heads to hydra ....

If we trust llama that he has destroyed any digital/electronic representation of the private key and the only place in the universe that it exists is inside that card then it is ready-made physical back-up as you would ever want to store large amounts of BTC. Just keep sending them to that public address on the card ... oh and remember not to give someone a BTC1 card that has BTC 10,000 loaded up on it!

From the FAQ;

"After each card has been produced and proven functional, we delete all records of the private key. This means that once the card leaves our hands, we can no longer access the associated bitcoins (be aware, this means we also can't help if you lose or destroy your card). Keypairs are generated on an offline computer that runs off of a flash drive which we will occasionally destroy in spectacular fashion."

I mean if he is doing all this to physically secure those private keys who can be bothered doing this themselves? It is another little niche market, providing secure, physical private keys that are not part of the electronic network and never have been (thus not possible to be subject to electronic tampering). Addresses associated with private keys secured like this are very useful as savings accounts. Good anonymity initially too.

Cool idea and a splendid realization! I've just ordered a few cards of each and hope to get my hands on these "real" Bitcoins soon

Very cool, you can even store more of your bitcoins in the bitbill address.
But I think paying directly with them isn't very secure.
Here's an attack:

1) I purchase a bitbill.
2) I put out the stick and scan the private key.
3) I put back the stick
4) I pay with the billbit. When the merchant verifies the bitbill, your server says. "Yes, the 20 btc are still there".
5) I use the private key to extract the bitcoins

Maybe the sticks are so special that make 3 impossible, but I don't think so.
Anyway, It will work great for gift cards and physical storing.
A bitcoin client that imports private keys from IQ-codes would be useful.

Sure, but there is a place for one-sided-web-access-only transactions. I'm not talking about getting rid of the denominated cards, just another possibility.

I think it would be pretty good since you could end up not destroying bills until they got large so the cost would be small as a %.

You people forget that the public key is visible. Therefore you cannot invalidate the card because you can look up the bitcoin address on blockexplorer.com to see if it has the funds in that the card claims.

Once someone decides to crack open the card, they'll be the first to spend them.

BitBills should include some kind of serial code / id number which can be used to verify it on their website. That way you can verify that the card actually came from them. Maybe they could sell POS scanners that verify the tokens when swiped.

I think the "use case" bitbills is trying to address is offline transactions, there the importance of the "face value".

Oh, yeah... and you could have unmarked bills. You could increase the value of them as needed and check the balance anytime. Might be more reasonable to pay .3BTC for an unmarked card than a 1BTC card. Of course all of these cards can already be increased, but people might look at you funny (okay funnier) when you insist that the 1BTC card is worth 45BTC.

That's probably the safest way to sell them, actually.

I am interested in purchasing these cards... Can I Buy a few of them, 'unloaded,' once I have confirmed that they have arrived safely and are untamed with. You send the coins to the addresses contained?

(Shipping to Aus)

That would make the backup location (and the creators if they know a needed password) a target pretty fast since you could score all the unclaimed bitbills face value in circulation at once.

Two questions.)

1.) Would you consider a private branding issue of these?

 e.g., some generic white label or perhaps with custom private branding instead?

2.) When I grab a prepaid card at the grocery store there are no funds on it until the cashier processes it through the point of sale.  If these private branded versions were resold, it would be ideal if the cards had no value until sold.

There's nothing so perverse in that. Only the fact that the guy who loses it will be distributing part of his wealth to all other bitcoin holders. He has a strong interest not to lose the card.

I think that would work.


I agree with this, this way people won't camp near the ATM waiting for a good exchange rate.

You should contact the bitcoinlabs.com guys. They are building an ATM for BTC. As I understood it they wanted it to give out USD at current exchange rate, but it giving out BitBills would be way cooler.

I think that completely physical bitcoin tokens will comprise an insignificant portion of the 2,100,000,000,000,000 total base units (satoshis).

Well here's a crazy idea that even I wouldn't like... bitbills.com could somehow backup the wallets they put onto the cards.

Put an expiration date on the card, say 10 years into the future.

If the card hasn't been imported by that date, bitbills.com can spend those coins.

It also has the perverse outcome of removing bitcoins from the economy in case they are lost or destroyed, which is easily mitigated in the digital form by the current ability to easily back up and make copies of wallet files.

My prediction is that at first, people will probably redeem them soon after receiving them. Once Bitcoin becomes more widely known, this or something like it could become more widely traded, I think.

Yep...  :\

Exactly. And for this reason, even a counterfeit card could pass through hundreds or thousands of hands before being discovered as a fake (when someone decides to import it).