Topic: Why a physical bitcoin? (Read 2681 times)

Yes, I looked into what is involved in getting custom poker chips made. I decided it was a bit too much of an investment for the occasional home game when a $20 set does the job just as well.

Matthew, my epiphany was a home game among friends, not a fully functioning casino with physical bitcoins.

I had in mind a novelty item where a bitcoin enthusiast used these chips for people playing poker with friends at home.  Such chips would have no actual BTC value.  They are admittedly of marginal utility, since poker chips are generically denominated anyway and don't need a bitcoin logo on them to be treated as such.  However, it's the kind of thing that could develop interest - even as a novelty item - if all of a sudden some major offshore casino announces bitcoin gambling to the world and bitcoins take off as the cool new way to gamble online without borders (a serious possibility in my mind).

How widely do they have to be adopted before it becomes worthwhile for someone to attempt a counterfeit?  I only intend to do a few thousand of these at the most and that's it.  My motivation is to seed the market with the idea.  I am practically begging for somebody else to copy me and do it better, faster, and more securely for cheaper.

I actually spoke with a custom poker chip vendor, it was one of the formats I was considering before I went with brass coins.  Somebody should do a poker set denominated in bitcoins, it would be cool.

I just had an epiphany—real-life bitcoin poker with Casascius chips! 

As I stated in your other thread (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.513789)... The barrier to counterfeit this is very low. As this coin gains wider adoption and acceptance the motive to counterfeit goes very high.

I don't see how this could work.

One reason is just as a talking point when introducing people to bitcoin.
I already carry a few bitbills around in my pocket - having a casascius bitcoin as well will help make it clear that there is no central issuer and that the value is all in the private key.

I'm also giving a few to family as gifts.  While it would be easy to give them a thumb-drive and password etc - that's just not going to have any impact.
A physical representation of a bitcoin will be something people are far more likely to enjoy and keep safe and it will possibly get some of them interested in the concepts behind bitcoin.

Such a product already exists... the bank card from BitBills (assuming they're able to sell them)


I could probably already produce such a thing.  I have a pack of the holograms with no code on them... if I were to use a plastic card printer to print a credit-card-sized bank card and cover the private QR with one of the holograms, I'd essentially have something that met your need.


This is the exact reason I sort of want to do some 100 BTC golden bricks.  They would be very elderly compatible, because in their mind it sort of works like gold - it has a denomination and a fluctuating value they can look up.  Possession in this case would be 100% of the law.  If you want something to hold an arbitrary value of bitcoins and it doesn't matter if it's pre-denominated in some permanent fashion from a factory, why not just make a paper wallet?  If I told my grandma that this "bitcoin" was now really 100 bitcoins because of some voodoo I did on a computer, I'd instantly be over her head.

I have been thinking about this a bit and have a couple of suggestions for "version 2.0" of this product:

* On the metal blanks ditch the denomination.  Instead of "1 bitcoin" say "bitcoins".  Keep the rest the same.
* On the holographic side replace the printed short public key with the QR of the public key.  This is so it can be easily scanned to determine the stored value by a smart phone application.
* Inside keep the private key the same.

I can imagine a holographic sticker with a clear "window" and under the window you simply put a small square of material with the QR on one side and the short private key on the other.  Very simple, easy to mass produce, easy to assemble:

* Produce large sheets of material with 100s of the public QR embossed on one side and the corresponding short private key embossed on the other side.
* Cut into tiny squares in one step, producing 100s of squares for each sheet.
* Stick the squares on the sticky side of the holographic sticker with the QR facing out
* Attach the stickers to the blanks
* They could be sold with no BTC in the account, just the blank "coin", or they could be preloaded as is being done now.

Now, here is one use case I have already run across:  My elderly parents want to be able to have me buy them bitcoins over time.  They just want some in their portfolio, along with some gold, silver, etc. "just in case they go up".  They consider them like a penny stock.  They do not want to get involved with putting the client on their computer, getting a dwolla account, getting an exchange account, etc.  They just want me to set up an account for them, they send me cash, I buy them BTC.

This is perfect!  I buy them one of these physical coins, I remember the public key, I send it to them, they put it in their safe until they want to cash it in.  Whenever they want to buy some more BTC they send me a check, I sell them some of mine or buy some for them on the open market and then transfer the BTC to their "coin" in their safe.

They are very excited about this whole idea where they were very put off by my previous explanations of how I could get them the client.  They were very concerned about someone stealing them off their computer, stealing their computer, losing their computer or their computer crashing, etc.

The idea of having the coin in the safe is very appealing to them.

I would accept a known physical bitcoin for payment in person, and maybe pay a slight premium for one.  It would be pointless to buy one online as you are just wasting the 'premium' you paid for a physical coin.  The problems minor, but real.  Change is one, few times are items going to be exactly one bitcoin. 

Yes, I get that and that's reason enough...I was just wondering whether people had more utilitarian reasons for wanting them.

Steve, have you ever collected art or had a coin collection when you were a kid?  i know you grew up fast with women like Alyson around but these coins for me at least will be mementos and collectors items to sell or show off one day down the line when Bitcoin goes mainstream.  they will serve as "proof" that i was there from the beginning and was a supporter of the community.

These would be awesome for bitcoin geocaches.

Yes, exactly.  Keep in mind that anybody can acquire my coin blank - they merely need to take one of my coins, redeem it, and clean off all the hologram residue until it shines again.  Hence why my name is simply on the hologram and not on the metal.

Also the people who make holograms understand that they are made for securing things - so they require crap from you to put names on a hologram, including signed documentation asserting your legal right to use the words and images you're putting on the hologram in the first place.  Even to just use the Bitcoin logo (they fully understood it's part of an open source project) I still had to sign a statement explaining why I believed my use of it was rightful.  It seems that that's a generally accepted practice in that industry, promoted by their trade associations.  (sure, the people knocking off Microsoft CD's in China probably don't care, but with those resources, they're probably unlikely to want to go knocking off one guy's hobby project).  So anyway, for anybody to just call up and try to "order a Casascius hologram", or "please duplicate this hologram"... they're going to get obstacles along the way.

Hmm.  I don't think I like that much.
I guess it wouldn't be that hard for someone to counterfeit the brass coin itself.. but It seems odd to me that you'd encourage some other provider to produce something that looks extremely similar.  Do you mean that the brass coin itself would be identical, and only the hologram would indicate who the coin loader was?

If anybody has a serious interest in producing physical bitcoins and is willing to invest $2k on their own holograms (the hologram people will do all the art and everything for you, I'll offer a referral), I would be willing to share some of my brass coin blanks at my cost (for which I received a decent quantity discount, and which will be cheaper than if you went and had your own done in a smaller quantity, especially after considering the custom die and artwork charges).  I have well over 10,000 (150+ lbs) of 1 BTC coin blanks.

Demand for these is unexpectedly high even asking a 20-25% premium, and I have not even acknowledged any requests from outside the US, and I am not sure I will be able to satisfy it all on an ongoing basis with the time I am able to devote to this.  (in other words, wow, holy shit, these are selling at least as fast as I can make them and I don't even have a website yet)

These are cool, but I'm curious why people feel the need to have a tangible bitcoin.  To me it kind of reminds me how early autos were made to look like horse drawn buggies.  I get the need for some people to have a physical way of securing bitcoins because of the current usability issues with doing that digitally, but aside from that and the novelty aspect, what is compelling about them?  For me, one of the great advantages of bitcoin is that it does away with the need for such a physical manifestation of a token (while not losing some important properties of physical token).

Or - when redeemed at merchant X, worth 1.25 BTC instead of 1.0. Or something.

Instead of charging a premium...you could always try to pay for the overhead with advertising.

You can get a sponsor for putting a logo on X amount of coins. Just put a McDonalds logo on one side instead of the "B" or whichever logo.

Who knows, maybe the cost would be covered by the ads.

You can also put advertising on the pages that you sell the coins on with a "sponsored by Meze Grill"

i just ordered my 100