I would be interested. But a good idea to make a coin worth of cash value also is to gold plate it?
I'll keep that in mind, thanks for the feedback.
I love Casascius coins. I think they are awesome, they deserve the attention they get, and I am now thinking about creating my own coins, similar in format to Casascius coins.
The big reason I want to do this is as a way to use some of the great firstbits addresses I have. You could buy a coin with 1KILO on the back of it, and know that you can always look up the full address of that coin at blockchain.info (or firstbits.com when it is back up). Or, buy a coin with 1KIRK on the back, redeem the coin by importing the private key into your Bitcoin client, and then use the address as your own (perfect if your name is Kirk?).
These coins would:
- have custom security level hologram on one side with private key behind it (~$5000 sunk fee)
- have elaborate design on the other side
- potentially have some sort of edging on the coin (like US quarters do)
- likely be 1.5" in size
- all be 1 BTC coins (1 BTC is held inside of the private key)
- all have premium firstbits addresses on them, such as 1SEXY, 1KIRK, 1KILO, 1STUD, 1MUSIC, 1AAAAA, etc
Decisions to be made:
- Design of hologram and coin face.
- Size of coin.
- Straight metal coin, or colored?
- Is 1 BTC too much or too little?
- NAME of the coin.
Your thoughts? Would you be interested in such a coin?
Design: Casascius got it right the first time. Bitcoin logo, denomination, year minted. Maybe "In Satoshi We Trust"?
Size: Probably around the size of a JFK half dollar: slightly larger than a quarter.
Color: Probably straight metal. Maybe consider making a few special edition ones in .999 silver? Other than that, probably nickel plated zinc or pure nickel.
Denominations: You might also want to consider
BTC0.5 and
BTC0.1,
BTC1 is a nice novelty, but nobody is going to realistically trade in
BTC1 increments.
Name: No idea
Yes, I agree Casascius coins were well designed! I obviously need my own design, but general style/feeling, it would probably end up similar. I was thinking a bit larger than a JFK half-dollar (1.2"), but perhaps you are right and that would be too large.
The biggest problem with denominations is how do I decide which address gets which denomination? Should it be random, or selected by the customer, or attempt to select the best out of the bunch for the higher denominations? I thought about it before, and didn't really want to let the customer select by denomination, as that would mean I would have to wait to apply a hologram until the coin was ordered. If I don't apply them in a big batch, but instead one by one as they are ordered, I can see it leading to mistakes. Mistakes are not acceptable in a project like this. Maybe I could just do them in batches, and let the addresses fall where they will.